Marxist Theory of Art

Steven Rose: Can genetics explain human nature?

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:56:00 +0000

A 45-minute talk [1] by Steven Rose which sets out a persuasive and progressive approach to the dialectics of genetics and culture. He argues:

“To argue that we are determined by our genes, without actually understanding that our genes are meaningless except in the context of the cells in which they are embedded, the bodies in which those cells exist, the societies in which those bodies actually grow up, and the ways in which we transform continuously those societies as we grow and change the world around us, is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of what it is to be the bio-social organism that we are.“

[1] The person who posted this on YouTube has not written when or where it was recorded.

Alva Noë – we are not our brains

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:39:00 +0000

A video of an excellent talk by by the philosopher Alva Noë, in which he argues that consciousness cannot be reduced to our brains but arises out of a wider engagement with our environment.

Songs of struggle

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:14:00 +0000

In case readers think I have been idle, I have opened a YouTube account and created two playlists named ‘Songs of Struggle’, parts 1 and 2. These are songs with which the workers’ movement can identify.

Visit my channel and take a look.

Or go direct:

Playlist one is here.
Playlist two is here.

Obviously there are countless other singers and songs which could have been included – Victor Jara, Billy Bragg, etc – so perhaps I’ll create further playlists in the future. I’m open to suggestions.

On the riots in England

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 12:49:00 +0000

Carlos Latuff’s comment on the riots:

Originally posted on his Twitpic account.

And one from Martin Rowson:

From his page at the Guardian website.

As for how to interpret the rioting, I side with Russell Brand’s piece in the Guardian:

However “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable” it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can’t justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in.

Unless on the news tomorrow it’s revealed that there’s been a freaky “criminal creating” chemical leak in London and Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham that’s causing young people to spontaneously and simultaneously violate their environments – in which case we can park the ol’ brainboxes, stop worrying and get on with the football season, but I suspect there hasn’t – we have, as human beings, got a few things to consider together.

...[A] state of deprivation though is, of course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports is probably easier to desecrate if you can’t afford what’s in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up.

I remember Cameron saying “hug a hoodie” but I haven’t seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don’t vote, they’ve realised it’s pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the “we don’t give a toss about you” party.

Politicians don’t represent the interests of people who don’t vote. They barely care about the people who do vote. They look after the corporations who get them elected...

Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, “mindlessly”, motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that’s why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers.

These young people have no sense of community because they haven’t been given one. They have no stake in society because Cameron’s mentor Margaret Thatcher told us there’s no such thing.

If we don’t want our young people to tear apart our communities then don’t let people in power tear apart the values that hold our communities together.

Good Nazis, bad news, part 3

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 12:00:00 +0000

3

From Dr Kassell in Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) to Major Toht in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), fascists have been a staple of cinema for many decades. Some of these portrayals, like the character Max Aldorfer in The Night Porter (1974) or even Rolf the messenger in The Sound of Music (1965), have been less straightforward than the stereotypical ‘evil Nazi’. The trends outlined above, however, represent a qualitative change in the representation of fascists onscreen. Hitler has never before been so humanised, and sympathetic fascists, coyness towards the true history of fascist personalities and atrocities, and outright heroes who are also unrepentant Nazis have never been presented in such quantity or quality before.

The rehabilitation of fascism

To fully understand these sympathetic depictions of fascists and blatant abuses of history, we must place the films in context. Western capitalism is struggling to reverse a relative economic decline. This is part of the foundation upon which the complex superstructure of history, politics and culture is built.

My argument is that these films represent one part of a broad rehabilitation of fascism. These films represent only one section of film-makers, and one section of the ruling class.[18] The Western bourgeoisie is not trying to introduce fascist governments. But it has a powerful interest in encouraging the influence of far right parties to assist its attacks on the working class. If fascism is to channel enough mass support to put pressure on mainstream politics, it must to an extent be legitimised. It must be made less monstrous through the application of ‘shades of grey’.

The films falsify or distort history through a highly selective use of characters and themes. Selected facts, when torn from their interconnectedness with other facts, can become the building blocks of all kinds of unpleasantness. One does not even have to lie – but the resulting narrative is dishonest because it uses partial empirical evidence to misrepresent the totality of a situation.

By emphasising certain things and downplaying or ignoring others, it is easy to create a credible case for what these films are trying to do. The world really is more morally complex than an uncompromising condemnation of fascism seems to allow. Not every person in a fascist uniform was a genocidal villain: no doubt many thousands made pleasant conversation, loved their pets, and sent money to their mothers. Thousands more were deluded or ignorant about the movement they were participating in, and still more thousands were repelled by it but did not dare confront it. Fascism does pose moral complexities and contradictions, and in the past directors have tended to leave these unexplored. John Rabe really did help protect thousands of Chinese refugees, and Hitler and other fascist leaders really were human beings – so why not say so?

Such objections seem reasonable. But for a proper perspective, we must not misleadingly emphasise individual facts, but consider the sum total of facts.

If the only piece of information we had about Hitler was that he was a vegetarian, most people would have either a neutral or in some cases a very positive response. But if we were then also told that Hitler was a genocidal tyrant, then his vegetarianism would become an irrelevance. Likewise, cinema today is providing us with an abundance of humanitarian fascists who sing songs, protect refugees, donate their life savings to Jewish survivors and bravely try to kill Hitler, but the main fact about the Nazis is not whether selected figures performed admirable acts. Nazism was cruelly prejudiced against homosexuals, women, Black people and other minorities. It sterilised 400,000 disabled people and practised euthanasia against thousands more. It instituted a police state, imprisoned and tortured thousands of political opponents, initiated the most brutal war the world has ever seen, and set up death camps for the systematic extermination of millions of Jews and other victims. It was one of the most horrific episodes in history in which tens of millions of people were killed.

In Downfall, the Holocaust is relegated to one sentence in the credits. Indeed, in the Italian comedy Life is Beautiful (1997), a concentration camp becomes the setting for slapstick comedy – in its single explicit image of mass murder, a heap of bodies is only dimly seen, in case its intrusion upsets the film.

One might object that the horrors of the period have been exhaustively explored and that there is no need to repeat them. But context is essential. If the full horror of fascist regimes is relegated to the background, it can become a regrettable excess offset by the good works done by its kindest members, or by the cheerful antics of its victims. No doubt there were people, like the character Guido Orefice in Life is Beautiful or Jakob in Jakob the Liar, who managed to raise people’s spirits with a joke in the ghettos or the camps, but they are so untypical of the experience that to highlight them without the full context of what those places represented is at best in poor taste. (Fortunately the ‘death camp comedy’ is one trend that even the bourgeoisie has not seen fit to pursue.) Without turning a blind eye to the total reality of history, some of these films would be morally unthinkable.

Trends like the ‘good Nazi’ normalise fascism, suggesting that it is possible to be both a sympathetic person and a fascist – people like Hitler become relatively isolated and extreme cases. This approach makes fascism more acceptable as a political choice. Those who take a firm stand and dismiss fascism on principle may then be accused of being simplistic or even, absurdly, as intolerant as the fascists themselves.

In addition, the traditional bourgeois parties refuse to take any action against fascist organisations, the media legitimise the BNP, and far right violence – such as the threat of white fascist terrorism or the street riots of the EDL – goes barely acknowledged by the authorities.

Justifications can be made for any of these films’ individual choices. It is when they are taken together, in their full political context, that they constitute a disquieting trend in contemporary cinema.

Determinism

One might think our argument guilty of ‘economic determinism’ for trying to explain aspects of cinema by reference to the means of production.

In fact, the correspondence between base and superstructure is never mechanical. The decline of Western capitalism has led to highly contradictory developments. These range from the entry of fascists into European governments to the socialist revolution in Venezuela. Between these poles stretches a complex and variegated landscape. Within social democracy alone, we see such diverging trends as the Thatcherism of New Labour and the ‘pink tide’ of the administrations in Ecuador, Brazil and other countries in Latin America. Every such development is a response to a general world situation through the prism of particular conditions, not least the balance of power between the classes.

The rise of neo-fascism is not the only development from the crisis of capital. But it is by far the most dangerous. Similiarly, a relative indulgence of fascism is not the only trend in cinema, as explicitly anti-fascist films are also being made. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is a striking example of a film that pulls no punches in its depiction of Francoist brutality, and openly identifies with the progressive forces opposing it; the 2005 adaptation of V for Vendetta sided with a vigilante trying to subvert a racist, homophobic regime. The existence of such films does not mean that the ‘sympathetic’ trend does not exist and does not represent real political and cultural forces, nor does it mean that it is not a matter of concern.

The historical precedent is obvious – the last time the world suffered a financial crisis of this magnitude, Hitler was occupying the Chancellery within four years. No crude analogy should be made with 1929, in which mass fascist parties were bidding for state power and in Italy had already succeeded. Fascism’s victory in Spain, Italy and Germany followed years of radicalisation, during which the proletariat had the opportunity to take power but, held back by Stalin and social democracy, failed to seize it. In 2010*, the situation is far less radicalised and fascist forces have made relatively less progress: their fortunes are still variable, their support unstable.

Fascist violence and electoral support is nonetheless firmly on the rise, and the present crisis, which has exposed the mainstream parties as unwilling to protect the interests of the working class, has the potential to create conditions even more favourable to fascism.

Just as the rise of fascism is not mechanically determined, nor is its victory. Fascism could have been stopped in the 1920s and 1930s, and it can be stopped today. But it requires a determined campaign capable of exerting hegemonic leadership over the anti-fascist majority. Nothing is inevitable – human praxis helps to direct history.

Artists and fascism

Are these artists – film-makers, scriptwriters, television producers, etc – consciously trying to rehabilitate fascism?

The rehabilitation of fascism is a deliberate bourgeois project. Quite how far artists are conscious of the role they are playing is debatable and will vary from artist to artist. It is difficult to believe, faced with the oversights and distortions in these films, that some are not at least partly conscious of what they are doing. However, most of these films have above all an anti-fascist message: the ‘shades of grey’ exist alongside that message.

There are millions of people living and dead about whom films may be made, and an infinite number of real or imaginary situations. Films, like all works of art, flow from a series of choices. What the critic must unravel is why film-makers choose particular situations and characters and tell their stories from particular points of view.

The important question however is not, are these artists consciously trying to rehabilitate fascism? I doubt very much if they are. To suggest that Schindler’s List, which I have discussed in this context, is an attempt to ‘encourage sympathy for fascism’ would be preposterous. However, it is not the intentions behind people’s actions that are most important, but their effect upon the real world. The cinema helps to form people’s opinions and condition their attitudes to political movements. The significance of Schindler’s List is that it introduced the ‘good Nazi’ to cinema screens across the world in the mid-1990s and, no doubt unwittingly, set a precedent that allowed later films like John Rabe to go much further.

Cultural trends exist in a complex and mediated relationship with the economic foundations of society. It is possible that cabals of bosses are conspiring in smoky rooms about how to encourage support for the BNP through tendentious film-making, but it is hardly likely, nor is it necessary. Historical processes and their accompanying shifts of ideology can influence people’s behaviour whether or not they are conscious of it, and artists are attuned to such changes on the cultural level. When a space is opened up for the extreme right by the bourgeoisie, some artists respond to the questions this raises and express them in works like the films we have discussed.

The main question we must ask is: how does cinema, whatever the intentions behind it, influence popular perceptions? I would argue that some film-makers’ highly selective readings are providing ammunition for fascism. They are making it possible for Party members like Oskar Schindler, John Halder, John Rabe et al to be held up as evidence that fascists too may be respectable.

We also need to consider how films get made. Some artists, influenced by trends in politics or expected by financial backers to approach a subject in a ‘contemporary’ manner – a manner perhaps influenced by the postmodern view that all discourses are relative – are more likely than in the past to think sympathetic portrayals of Nazis are acceptable, original or ‘thought-provoking’. Given that it takes several years to get a film from concept to release, often directors will attempt to anticipate future trends. What this means in effect is that some of the most ‘avant garde’ directors in Hollywood – Von Trier for example – swerve between the centre and ultra-reactionary end of the political spectrum in search of celebrity and reward.

An example of a film which deals with fascism without making concessions to it is Shane Meadows’ This is England (2007). Told through the eyes of the 12 year-old Shaun, Meadows’ film explores how far-right politics drove the skinhead movement of the 1970s away from its roots in black culture towards racism. This includes Combo, a member of the National Front, who is not demonised but portrayed with some sympathy as he tries to recruit Shaun’s gang to his politics. Meadows looks honestly at some of the motivations that made young white people get involved in fascism:

These were teens who came from areas of high unemployment looking for solidarity beyond Thatcher’s ‘me’ culture. They were abandoned by society and that, of course, made them vulnerable to the advances of the National Front...

When you’re twelve and no one in your town can get a job, and someone comes up to you and says ‘these people are to blame’ it’s easy to believe. I did for about three weeks, some people still believe that as adults and that’s frightening.[19]

But the film does not slip into the trends we have been discussing. Combo is not a ‘good Nazi’ but a confused and dangerous man. The progressive and anti-racist character of the original gang is asserted as an alternative to the National Front’s vile ideology, and the climactic act of violence not only drives Shaun away from fascism but exposes the contradictions within Combo’s own character and leaves him empty. Using images of the Falklands War, Meadows even makes an explicit connection between racism and imperialism. This Is England shows that it is possible to allow complex characterisation of, and even a measure of sympathy for, members of the National Front or other organisations without whitewashing history, introducing inappropriate moral ambiguities or turning fascists into heroes.

Conclusion

It should be unthinkable, after the horrific experience of the 1920s-1940s, that anybody would consider turning to fascism ever again, but the potential for fascism within imperialism never goes away. Europe’s neo-fascists do not wear black shirts and jackboots and publicly demand the liquidation of the Jews – they wear suits, participate in elections, and deny they are fascists at all. The sentiments that contemporary fascism feeds on – Islamophobia, prejudice against immigrants, attacks on multi-culturalism, concern about a ‘white working class’ with separate needs to the black working class, and so on – are firmly established in mainstream politics.

We should have no illusions in the media, which are almost entirely owned by the bourgeoisie and ultimately serve its class interests. But the general silence on how some films are representing fascists is nonetheless reprehensible. Few film critics point out that some contemporary films are inviting us to sympathise with racists and fascists, and that this is inappropriate and dangerous. Downfall in particular created controversy upon its release, but the subsequent debate has been completely inadequate. Even with John Rabe, the debate centred not on its having an unabashed Nazi hero who protects refugees under a giant swastika but on the effect upon Sino-Japanese relations of depicting the Nanjing Massacre. Is the depiction of fascists as heroes really not worthy of comment?

None of the trends outlined here is entirely new – even concentration camp comedy has been attempted before, in Jerry Lewis’s unreleased 1972 movie The Day the Clown Cried. But their prominence in contemporary films warns us that a sea change may be underway. If film-makers are broadly keeping to an anti-fascist position today, what of tomorrow? How will the sympathy be extended further over the next couple of decades?

We are experiencing a radicalisation to both the right and the left. It is inevitable that if the rise of fascism is allowed to continue, cultural expressions will appear which are more and more sympathetic to it; at the same time, others will explicitly oppose it. No development is inevitable. The victory of fascism in Europe could have been avoided: it was the outcome of a political struggle in which the rotten politics of Stalin and of social democracy betrayed the working class. As Trotsky wrote: “fascism comes only when the working class shows complete incapacity to take into its own hands the fate of society.”[20] No concession should be made to fascism or the racism it feeds on, and it should be permitted no platform upon which to build.

Art is one of the arenas in which this ideological struggle will find expression. Despite the problems we’ve discussed, these films are not pro-fascist, and the appropriate anti-fascist response is not to call for their censorship, or the witch-hunting of directors. Instead we need to create a genuine debate which clarifies anti-fascist arguments both for film-makers and for cinema-goers. Film-makers would be less likely to indulge the trends we’ve discussed if they knew they would be held to account and were more conscious of their broader political significance.

With Jodie Foster’s biopic about Leni Riefenstahl and other works currently in development, anti-fascists should be aware of this trend in cinema, and draw behind them the broadest possible forces of anti-fascist opinion to expose and question it. There is no shame in depicting fascism as a tremendous evil, but plenty in helping to rehabilitate it.

*I wrote this article last year. Happily, Jodie Foster appears to have abandoned her Riefenstahl project and the tide of films of this sort seems to have abated. But the general political context is much the same and further concessions to the far-right in culture are likely. On the positive side we may add the protests in the Middle East to the slowly increasing level of class struggle outside of the imperialist countries. Tragically we may also add the atrocities of Anders Breivik to the growing problem of fascist violence. The difference between how the attacks in Norway were treated when Muslims were suspected, and the relative media silence once a white racist was found to be responsible, illustrates the ruling class’s double standards regarding terrorism and its failure to confront fascism. – Eugene Hirschfeld

[18] The readiness of the Canary Wharf consortium to sponsor multicultural events in London exemplifies a contradiction within the bourgeoisie. Depending as it does on easy movement of international personnel, the City tends to be hostile towards racist controls on immigration.
[19] Shane Meadows quoted on www.thisisenglandmovie.co.uk.
[20] Trotsky, op. cit..

Good Nazis, bad news, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 10:00:00 +0000

2

The films mentioned at the beginning of this article are not completely unprecedented, as fascists and fascism have been portrayed onscreen for decades. What is striking today is a number of key trends that are appearing in so many new films.

Enter the good Nazi

The first of these trends is the ‘good Nazi’. This term was originally coined for Albert Speer, the architect and prominent Party member who served as Minister of Armaments and War Production in Hitler’s regime. Claiming ignorance of the Holocaust to escape execution at the Nuremburg trials, Speer argued that he drew close to the Führer not out of political conviction but in order to realise his dreams as an architect. He would not be the last Nazi to protest innocence of his regime’s horrors.

The ‘good Nazi’ – the more general ‘good fascist’ would be better, but the label is already current as a cinematic type – has become a favourite theme in contemporary film. In Schindler’s List he is Oskar Schindler, the industrialist and Party member who uses his factories to spare Jews from the concentration camps. In Captain Corelli’s Mandolin he is the eponymous Captain Corelli, a soldier in the Italian fascist army who sings songs and falls in love with one of the women whose island his army occupies. In The Pianist he is Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, the music-loving officer who brings food to the haggard Szpilman in the ruins of Warsaw. In The Counterfeiters he is Bernhard Kruger, the chief of a Sachsenhausen counterfeiting operation, who provides his Jewish workers with privileges, never hits his children, and whose Party membership is mere opportunism. In Black Book he is the SS officer Ludwig Müntze, who baulks at the atrocities of his superiors and ends up as the lover and protector of the heroine. In Valkyrie he is Von Stauffenberg, the principled officer who tries to bring the war to an end by assassinating Hitler. In John Rabe he is the loyal Party member who is shocked by Japanese atrocities in China.

In Good, directed by Vicente Amorim, the protagonist John Halder is a professor and decent family man whose novel on euthanasia brings him to the attention of the Nazi Party. Initially hesitant, Halder agrees to be recruited to the Party in the interests of keeping it in touch with ‘humanity’. Despite warnings from his Jewish friend Maurice, Halder somehow manages to remain ignorant of the regime’s racism and finds himself being mobilised for Kristallnacht. It is only when Halder goes in search of the now missing Maurice and is confronted with a concentration camp that the penny finally drops.

The film explores how a series of choices (in combination with moral cowardice) takes a civilised man to the point where he finds himself serving the SS and helping to perpetrate the Holocaust. On one level, Good is a serious attempt to understand how the population of an advanced state might be seduced into collaborating with a vicious regime. On another, it offers us yet another character who is a good person despite their fascist uniform.

The message delivered by the ‘good Nazi’ is that it is possible to be both a decent person and a fascist. He or she often has a connection to traditional (i.e. pre-fascist) culture, and demonstrates sympathetic traits such as loving music, reviling Hitler, rescuing Jews, and so on. Indeed, the sympathy the character encourages is such that he or she must usually share the film with another fascist who is an unmitigated psychopath – for every Oskar Schindler, an Amon Göth – lest its moral compass be lost completely.

John Rabe is often compared to Oskar Schindler [5]. Whereas Schindler clearly acted against the racist policies of the Party, Rabe’s relationship to it is played down onscreen, for example when he is shown, after initial reluctance, joining the American doctor Robert Wilson in the singing of an anti-Nazi song. But not only did this humanitarian join the NSDAP in 1933, he was head of the local branch in Nanjing. During the Japanese invasion he sent a telegram to Hitler in sincere expectation of assistance, and reportedly said in a lecture in 1938: “Although I feel tremendous sympathy for the suffering of China, I am still, above all, pro-German and I believe not only in the correctness of our political system but, as an organiser of the party, I am behind the system 100 percent” [6] – additional evidence suggests that he meant it. When in the film Rabe is confronted by the Jewish diplomat Rosen about the persecution of Jews, he has nothing to say in response. It is true that Rabe, like Schindler, is partly non-racist in practice, by saving the lives of thousands of Chinese, an ethnic group that most fascists would consider racially inferior. He nonetheless patronises them as being “like children”, a view that is never challenged. Just 16 years after Schindler’s List rewrote the rules on whom we may sympathise with in films, John Rabe is perhaps the most egregious of them all, because neither its eponymous hero nor the film itself expresses any significant discomfort with his membership of the Nazi Party. This character is perhaps the first of his kind, and certainly he will not be the last.

“Ten years ago,” commented Ulrich Tukur, the actor who plays the title role in John Rabe, “it was not possible to conceive that there was such thing as a good Nazi.” [7] Today, it is hard to find a film about fascism that does not include this character type.

Humanising Hitler

The second trend requires breaking an even stronger taboo. This is the humanisation of Hitler himself. The most powerful example of this was the performance by Bruno Ganz in Downfall. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film – undoubtedly anti-fascist in its overall impact – depicts the final days of Nazi Germany, mostly through the experiences of the coterie around Hitler in the Führerbunker. Ganz reimagines with great power Hitler’s frustrated tirades, his marshalling of non-existent armies, and his monstrous indifference to suffering, but he also, inevitably, shows more. The Führer comes across as a wretched and hate-filled human being, but a human being nonetheless.

Downfall was not of course the first film to depict Hitler as a character. In Britain, various respected actors have played the role, such as Alec Guinness in 1973’s Hitler: The Last Ten Days and Anthony Hopkins in the 1981 TV drama The Bunker. In Germany, however, Downfall had to overcome a powerful taboo on the appearance of Hitler as a leading character played by a German-speaking actor [8]. Ganz’s powerful performance helped to justify that step and quickly became a benchmark.

Other recent cinematic portrayals of Hitler include Menno Meyjes’s Max (2002) in which we see Hitler deciding whether to devote his life to art or politics, and the 2005 TV drama Uncle Adolf, starring Ken Stott, which explores Hitler’s relationship with his niece Geli Raubal (‘Hitler’s darkest passion’, as the blurb has it). This film takes the humanisation of Hitler much further than Downfall. Early on, Hitler cuts an often jovial figure, larking around with his friends and charming Raubal with his jokes – he is twice referred to as a “wonderful man” and is even shown with Raubal in sexual scenes. Whatever we know about history, many viewers will find it hard not to be provoked to some measure of sympathy when presented with a story of failed love, however twisted the relationship. Even during the last days in the bunker, the film allows Hitler to make an appeal for sympathy: “Have you any idea,” he complains to Eva Braun, as Soviet bombs fall outside, “what this is like for me?”

Although actors often invest months of research in crafting these performances, the quality of their acting is a secondary issue compared to the political significance of breaking the taboo on humanising Hitler. Downfall opened a door, allowing others to go even further.

The humanisation of Hitler may seem excusable on a facile level because Hitler was, undeniably, a human being. One might argue that the alternative is to restrict ourselves to a black and white caricature of a historical figure. With a distance of over sixty years since the end of the war, surely we can now step beyond this simplistic level? After all, Hitler on screen usually comes across as little more than a repulsive lunatic, which is unlikely to win anyone to his politics.

The problem is that to humanise Hitler onscreen is to normalise him and invite a sympathy from the viewer that is completely inappropriate. The dominant fact about Hitler is not that he allegedly fancied his niece, or was a vegetarian, or loved his dog Blondi, but that he was a vicious racist and the lead instigator of the worst atrocity in European history. Bruno Ganz commented, “He had no pity, no compassion, no understanding of what the victims of war suffered. Ultimately, I could not get to the heart of Hitler because there was none.”[9]

To what end would you invite sympathy with such a figure? One answer would be that it may be profitable to try to ‘understand’ the mentality of Hitler. But little can be learnt about the great forces of history from his personal psychology. Fascism was not the invention of an individual ‘evil genius’ who bewitched millions of innocents into following him, but a national movement that can only be understood by reference to the social forces of the time. Hitler was, so to speak, ‘chosen’ by history to front that movement in Germany. If it had not been him, then some other figure would have been filmed by Hirschbiegel ranting in the bunker. If the individual psychology of Hitler does not offer any real insight, turning him into a cinematic character makes an unacceptable moral compromise for zero gain.

The whitewashing of history

The third trend is the whitewashing of history through the distortion or highly selective use of documented facts. This is unavoidable if film-makers want to make fascist characters palatable to most cinema-goers.

Much of Downfall is presented through the eyes of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary. Junge is played as an innocent, and appears in interview at the beginning and end of the film to claim that she knew nothing about the extermination camps. This ‘massaging of history’ was severely criticised by historians David Cesarani and Peter Longerich [10]. Nothing in the film is more unconvincing, they point out, than Junge’s eyes widening in shock when she hears Hitler ranting against the Jews. In reality, Junge was a committed National Socialist with a role at the centre of power in the Third Reich.

Downfall portrays most of the bunker’s inhabitants as part of a practical officer caste, honour-bound by oath to an extremist Nazi clique and struggling to manage a desperate situation. This division of the ruling elite into honourable soldiers and callous Nazis is also unconvincing, as we are fed the ghastly spectacle of Waffen-SS officers such as General Mohnke raising humanitarian objections to Hitler’s orders. Or there is the doctor Ernst Günther Schenck, who braves the Soviet advance to help the wounded. Cesarani and Longerich point out that not only had Schenk served in the SS, but after the war he “was implicated in the conduct of ‘frivolous’ medical experiments on inmates in Mauthausen concentration camp.” To represent such a character as a sympathetic hero without mention of this past is an extraordinary ‘oversight’ [11].

Another beneficiary of the historical whitewash is Claus Schenk Von Stauffenberg, portrayed not only in Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie but in a number of recent German films. Von Stauffenberg was a leading figure in the conspiracy that planned to assassinate Hitler in the bomb plot of 20 July 1944 and then mobilise reserve troops (Operation Valkyrie) to complete a coup. Valkyrie’s tagline promises heroic deeds: “Many saw evil. They dared to stop it.” Yet far from being a ‘good’ Nazi, the real Von Stauffenberg was an aristocratic reactionary who welcomed the creation of a German empire. According to historian Roger Moorehouse,

He had been an early and enthusiastic supporter of Nazism, for example, and had welcomed Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. He embraced all of those subsequent measures – the reintroduction of conscription, the remilitarisation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland – which were seen as ‘restoring German honour’.[12]

Although Von Stauffenberg never joined the Nazi party, this was due to elitism rather than principle. He was a racist who, after the 1939 Polish campaign, “described the Poles as ‘an unbelievable rabble’ of ‘Jews and mongrels’ who were ‘only comfortable under the knout’.” Von Stauffenberg’s participation in the conspiracy was motivated more by Hitler’s strategic failures in running the war than the extremely vague humanist ideals attributed to him by the film. This inconvenient context probably helps account for the under-development of Von Stauffenberg’s character. “I have admired him as a hero,” said Tom Cruise, who played him, “and I will play him as a hero.”[13]

The motivations of his fellow conspirators remain equally vague. Several of these characters are played by well-liked actors such as Bill Nighy and the comedian Eddie Izzard, which further encourages us to see them as benign figures.

As for the original ‘good Nazi’, Albert Speer, who insisted that he knew nothing about the Holocaust despite his proximity to Hitler, his myth has been debunked by documents unearthed by Berlin historian Susanne Willems. One report referring to how Auschwitz had been fitted to handle the ‘Final Solution’ was copiously annotated in Speer’s handwriting.[14] Speer’s protests of ignorance, like those of Traudl Junge, are simply not credible in the face of such evidence.

The altering of historical fact is not unusual in art, and is not in itself reprehensible – what matters are the messages that result. What is the effect upon the perceptions of an audience of portraying members of Hitler’s personal staff as innocent of the Holocaust? Of ignoring the atrocities committed by SS officers? Of depicting racist imperialists as heroes?

Moral ambiguity

The last cinematic trend we shall consider is the introduction of a moral ambiguity that questions whether or not fascists are especially repugnant.

For most of the post-war period the verdict on fascism was, rightly, uncompromising: it was an evil that cost millions of people their lives. Today, this verdict is apparently no longer satisfactory, as it is too simplistic and ignores the most interesting moral questions. Thus moral ambiguity is being used to pose ‘uncomfortable’ questions about complicity, and how easily any of us might fall into the same role as the characters onscreen.

An excellent example is the character Hanna Schmitz in The Reader [15], directed by Stephen Daldry. In this film a teenage boy, Michael, befriends a lonely older woman, Hanna, and begins a love affair with her. One day she disappears without warning, and he does not see her again until he is a law student attending a court trial as part of his training. With a shock, he realises that one of the six women in the dock charged with war crimes is his former lover. The key point in the trial comes during a discussion of a death march, when the women on trial locked 300 Jews in a church and let it burn to the ground. When the court produces a contemporary report of the event as evidence, the other defendants try to accuse Hanna of writing it. She admits to doing so, and is consequently sentenced more sternly than the others. But Michael alone knows that she could not have written the report, because she is illiterate.

Hanna admits to participating in the Holocaust, selecting women to be gassed and joining in a death march. The film’s preposterous thesis seems to be that she would rather be imprisoned for mass murder than exposed as illiterate. Perhaps we are meant to think she embraces punishment out of remorse, but if that is so, why are we not shown it? We are offered only the barest whiff of such a motivation. Either way, the film’s main theme is very clear. In the first section of the film we are encouraged to feel a certain sympathy for Hanna. Only then are we told what she has done, and expected to ask ourselves, what led her to behave this way?

It is a question to which the film offers no answer. As Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times, “you have to wonder who, exactly, wants or perhaps needs to see another movie about the Holocaust that embalms its horrors with artfully spilled tears and asks us to pity a death-camp guard”.[16] At the end of the film Hanna donates her money to one of the survivors of the camps. The survivor refuses it, but, in an unconvincing touch, keeps the old tin Hanna kept the money in because it reminds her of a tin she herself once owned. Although it belonged to an SS guard who helped kill her mother, she puts it on her mantelpiece in a trite and inappropriate image of ‘reconciliation’.

In another scene, a student from Michael’s law class becomes a heavy-handed representative of punitive inflexibility. Raging against Hanna Schmitz and her fellow ex-SS guards, he shouts: “You know what I’d do? Put the gun in my hand and shoot her myself. Shoot them all!” The film then cuts to Michael walking towards Auschwitz. The juxtaposition implies that those who take a hard line against fascists are little better than fascists themselves. In his call for violence, does the law student mean only the six women in the dock, or all the thousands of people who worked in the camps or merely knew about them – a comparable call to mass murder? In the same vein, Hanna demands of the judge at her trial, “What would you have done differently?” Flustered, he offers no reply.

Another film steeped in such moral ambiguity is Black Book. Directed by Paul Verhoeven, the film follows a Dutch Jewish singer called Rachel Stein and her almost picaresque passage from one tribulation to the next during the war. After her family is killed trying to flee the Nazi occupation, Stein becomes a spy for the Resistance, seducing an SS officer, Ludwig Müntze, with whom she falls in love. Then the situation reverses. The Resistance are tricked into thinking she has betrayed them, and they become her pursuers. Müntze, already alienated from his Nazi peers after refusing to carry out an atrocity, becomes her protector, and the lovers flee together from vengeful (and anti-Semitic) Resistance fighters. Towards the end we are presumably meant to grieve as Müntze is shot by an Allied firing squad.

The obvious message is that there is no moral distinction between the Nazis and the Resistance fighters who tried to stop them. The worst of Stein’s many tribulations comes not at the hands of fascists but after the victory, when a Dutch mob publicly humiliate her for supposedly being a collaborator. As Verhoeven put it: “In this movie, everything has a shade of grey. There are no people who are completely good and no people who are completely bad. It’s like life.”[17]

In reality, wanting to stop racism, dictatorship and mass murder is not in the least comparable to perpetrating them. Yet the implication that anti-fascists are no better than the fascists themselves appears again and again, both in these films and in the general media response to anti-fascist activism.

Certainly many people joined fascist parties out of fear or ignorance rather than because they were committed to those politics. But there is a thin line between forgiving the terrorised and forgiving the perpetrators of terror. The emphasis in certain films upon ambivalent characters and situations invites us not only to understand more, but to condemn less.

(Concluded in Part 3.)

[5] It might have been more interesting to film the achievements of the real ‘Chinese Schindler’, Ho Fengshan, a Chinese diplomat to Austria who helped possibly thousands of Jews escape the Third Reich by issuing them with visas to enter Shanghai.
[6] Quoted in David W. Chen, ‘At the Rape of Nanking: A Nazi Who Saved Lives’, New York Times, 15 December 1996.
[7] From an interview with Ulrich Tukur by the DPA news agency, cited on Deutsche Welle (www.dw-world.de), 9 February 2009.
[8] Hitler had been portrayed in German cinema one or two times before, for example by Albin Skoda in G. W. Pabst’s Der Letzte Akt in 1955. But Downfall broke new ground in seeking the ‘human’ side of the Führer.
[9] From Krysia Diver and Stephen Moss, ‘Desperately Seeking Adolf’, Guardian, 25 March 2005.
[10] David Cesarani and Peter Longerich, ‘The Massaging of History’, Guardian, 7 April 2005.
[11] These shortcomings are less surprising when we consider that Downfall was based largely on a book by Joachim Fest, the right-wing historian who helped Speer write his memoirs.
[12] Roger Moorhouse, ‘A Good German? Von Stauffenberg and the July plot’, History Today, Jan 2009.
[13] Quoted in Allan Hall, ‘Tom Cruise’s transformation into a heroic Nazi’, Daily Mail, 20 July 2007.
[14] See for example Kate Connolly, ‘Wartime reports debunk Speer as the Good Nazi’, Daily Telegraph, 11 May 2005.
[15] The Reader, like Schindler’s List, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and others, is based upon a novel, in this case 1995’s Der Vorleser by Bernhard Schlink – the new approach to fascism is not limited to the cinema.
[16] Manohla Dargis, ‘Innocence is Lost in Postwar Germany’, New York Times, 10 December 2008.
[17] Quoted in Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Homeward Bound’, The Guardian, 25 November 2005.

Good Nazis, bad news: fascism in contemporary film

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 09:00:00 +0000

1

December 1937: The soldiers of fascist Japan are attacking Nanjing, the capital city of China, and massacring thousands of its inhabitants. As the warplanes roar overhead, John Rabe, a German businessman working for Siemens, hurries back to his factory, surrounded by fleeing Chinese workers. He allows the gates to be opened and orders the unfurling of an immense swastika flag, urging the refugees beneath it. When the Japanese pilots see the symbol of their Nazi allies, they move on – in a grotesque image, the swastika has become the means to a humanitarian act.

John Rabe (2009), directed by Florian Gallenberger, is a German film about the so-called ‘good Nazi of Nanjing’ [1], who used his membership of Hitler’s NSDAP to help protect a safety zone that saved the lives of over 200,000 Chinese from Japanese aggression. It is just one of a slew of recent films, on both big and small screens, which encourage us to revise our attitudes towards fascism.

In The Pianist (2003), the protagonist Szpilman is rescued from starvation by a music-loving Nazi officer. In Valkyrie (2009), a conspiracy of high-ranking National Socialists led by Von Stauffenberg is appalled by the excesses of Hitler. Further examples include Black Book (2006), The Counterfeiters (2007), Good (2008) and The Reader (2008) – and in Downfall (2004) we see the humanising of Hitler himself. None of these films advocates fascism as a form of government, or disputes that Hitler was a nasty piece of work. But apparently there were nice fascists too – and in contemporary Western cinema we’re cheering them on.

This trend represents a qualitative change in how fascism is treated on film, and demands an obvious question: Why are some film-makers trying to show followers of modernity’s most vile political doctrine in a sympathetic light?

We shall discuss this trend and some of its most important films in more detail [2]. But first we need to look at the broader social, economic and political context in which they are being created. Artistic trends, like political ones, are products of particular historical circumstances. They cannot be ‘explained’ through that context in a simplistic fashion, as their relationship to it is uneven, but nor can they be separated from it without their full significance being missed. As I shall argue, the shift of the political discourse to the right over the last thirty years has permeated all levels of society, including its cultural products.

Context

We are presently living through an economic crisis, the worst since 1929 and still far from over, which is the product of a long, slow capitalist decline.

In the immediate post-war period the United States was by far the most dominant nation on the planet – it was the only nuclear-armed power and was responsible for half the world’s manufacturing output. Wartime industrial expansion helped to provide the resources to pour billions into rebuilding Germany and Japan, and allowed imperialism to reorganise itself around US hegemony.

From the 1970s however the US has been suffering a relative decline, whose principal cause is the immense competitive pressure placed upon the US economy by the higher levels of investment in Germany from the 1950s, in Japan from the 1960s, and in China today. With China in particular investing at historically unprecedented levels (more than 40% of GDP), it is extremely difficult for the Western powers to keep up.

As Karl Marx noted, capitalists must increase their level of investment in the means of production to remain competitive, but this investment grows more rapidly than the surplus value created by the workers – thus in the ratio of profit to investment, the rate of profit tends to fall.

Western capitalism’s response was the agenda pursued by Reagan, Thatcher and their neo-liberal successors since 1979: to transfer resources to capital from the working class by extending working hours, driving down wages, restricting trade unions and rolling back the welfare state. Their offensive has been made easier by the overthrow of the Russian Revolution in 1991, which dealt a huge blow to the prestige and influence of socialism in general. The Western capitalist alliance has also used the unrivalled military power of the United States to achieve goals it can no longer win by economic means. The most significant examples of this were the attacks on Iraq in 1990, Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq again in 2003.

Over the last thirty years, therefore, the bourgeoisie has driven politics in the Western states to the right, with militarism and racism in tow. Yet despite its attacks on the working class and the opening of new markets in the former workers’ states in Eastern Europe, Western imperialism has still not succeeded in reversing its relative decline. It is only in this context that the rise of fascism, and its treatment in the cultural sphere, can be fully understood.

What is fascism?

The precise nature of fascism was dissected by Leon Trotsky, who exposed as nonsense the Stalinist theory that all forms of capitalism were as bad as each other. Trotsky argued that whereas a ‘normal’ dictatorship (an example from recent times would be Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq) uses the standard police and institutional resources of the bourgeois state, fascism has a different character.

Presented with a crisis that threatens its very existence, capital needs greater forces on the ground to defeat the workers’ movement and mobilises a section of the masses, the petty bourgeoisie, which it uses “as a battering ram.”[3] A fascist regime sweeps aside independent organisations of the working class and subordinates the apparatus of the state to monopoly capital, increasing the exploitation of the working class (even as far as the use of slave labour) to produce the superlative profits that can extricate it from crisis.

The bourgeoisie has a contradictory relationship with fascism. It does not trust the petty bourgeois forces it mobilises, and in return the petty bourgeoisie engages in occasional rhetoric against big capital. Hence the distaste with which Hitler’s NSDAP was regarded by the traditional conservative parties in Germany. Nonetheless, fascism creates ideal conditions for big capital and cannot triumph without its full support. In his famous montage ‘Millions Stand Behind Me’, in which a businessman places wads of banknotes into Hitler’s saluting hand, the German artist John Heartfield neatly illustrated whose interests fascism truly serves.

Fascism therefore is not some perplexing psychological enigma: it is a capitalist response, logical in its way, to the kind of crisis that precipitated Europe into the First World War and intensified after the 1929 crash.

If fascism is a form of militant capitalism hostile to working class interests, why does a section of the working class support it? Hitler could not come to power with the votes of the petty bourgeoisie alone. These votes were won over through a combination of pseudo-socialist rhetoric and an appeal to nationalism and racism. This combination is manifested today in anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment and the myth of the ‘white working class’ as a distinct community whose needs are being overlooked. Fascism cannot thrive without racism, its repulsive ideological fuel.

Racism

Racism plays an essential part in the bourgeoisie’s response to the crisis, dividing the working class by turning its members against one another and scapegoating vulnerable minorities for the social problems arising from the failings of capitalism. The principle was summarised by Karl Marx in a letter of 1870 where he discussed anti-Irish prejudice:

Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker.[4]

Marx’s argument is just as true of the contemporary prejudices against Muslims, immigrants and other minorities.

Racism desensitises the West to the humanity of the many millions of people, overwhelmingly black, who suffer most from increasing global inequality. It ‘justifies’ brutal attacks on the Middle East and elsewhere by demonising people who come from the target region. At home, it diverts from government the blame for housing shortages and the other social problems exacerbated by neo-liberalism. Racism is thus imperialism’s ideological accomplice, expressed through anti-immigrant legislation, attacks on multi-culturalism, media scare stories about asylum seekers and Muslims (who are overwhelmingly from ethnic minorities), and other means. Sadly a section of the left also supports Islamophobia from a supposedly progressive direction, claiming that Islam is especially sexist, homophobic and reactionary. In practice, this scramble to abet the hounding of a minority provides a ‘left’ justification for imperialism’s wars and benefits racism.

The rise in racism inevitably boosts support for the fascist parties that feed on it. The public is frustrated by the identikit neo-liberalism of the main political parties. The bourgeoisie’s concern is that this discontent, and pressure upon mainstream politics, should be led by right-wing developments such as, in Britain, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the fascist British National Party (BNP). It is therefore allowing space for fascist arguments and even actively assists their profile. BNP leader Nick Griffin has been invited to speak on the BBC’s Newsnight and Question Time programmes, and the BNP’s bigotry is rarely challenged by mainstream politicians disarmed by their own concessions to racism.

The encouragement of racism has had concrete results. Globally there has been a slight shift in favour of the working class over the last decade, with the rise of China, the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and a general left shift in Latin America, and the stymieing of the US military in Iraq. In Europe, however, developments on the far right have equalled or outpaced those on the far left. In Italy and Austria, far right parties have taken part in governing coalitions. In France, National Front leader Le Pen reached the second round of the 2002 presidential elections. In Britain, where the far right has historically been less successful than on the continent, the BNP won two MEPs and nearly a million votes in the 2009 Euro-elections – the biggest vote for a fascist party in British history. In the English Defence League (EDL) we see a street-fighting movement that aims to intimidate Muslim communities.

It is in this context that sympathetic fascists are being introduced onto our screens.

(Continued in Part 2.)

[1] Rabe’s diaries were published under the less offensive title The Good Man of Nanking in 1998.
[2] This article is concerned with the political significance of the films discussed rather than their quality as cinema, which is variable.
[3] Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What it is and how to fight it (1944/1969).
[4] Karl Marx, letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870.

Marx and the Greek classics

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:09:00 +0000

Ancient Greek culture had a profound influence on late 18th and early 19th century Germany, especially Prussia, from the architecture of public buildings [1] to the educational curriculum, and was seen by a section of the intellectual elite as setting the standard for aesthetics, politics and society. Enlightenment humanists such as Hegel, Winckelmann, Lessing, Schiller and Goethe would have agreed with the Prussian educator Wilhelm von Humboldt’s view that “the Greek people were in a way the most exemplary expression of the idea of man”. The Greeks represented universality, self-realisation, the free, independent human being, and the love of beauty.

This version of Greek antiquity owed more to the conditions of Germany than to the reality of life in the ancient world. What the neo-classicists wanted from classical antiquity was a model for criticising the alienation, fragmentation and decadence of modernity. As Lukács put it, the ‘ideal’ age of Greece became part of a “humanist struggle against the degradation of man by the capitalist division of labour” [2]. This struggle tended to be fought on aesthetic and cultural rather than political ground.

Karl Marx inherited the ‘grecomania’ of the liberal bourgeoisie but would find his own uses for the classical legacy. At school in Trier and at university in Bonn and Berlin, he received the classical education that was de rigueur for a young German from a bourgeois family. A very early text, Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy [3], which has not survived, took the form of a Platonic dialogue. More significantly, for his doctoral thesis in 1841 Marx tackled the world of post-Aristotelian physics with a comparison of Democritus (Demokritos) and Epicurus (Epikouros) [4], which is worth looking at briefly.

Both these Greek philosophers believed that the basic division of matter was the atom: all things that happen result from atoms in constant motion as they collide and interact in the void. But the young Marx argues a distinction between the deterministic materiality of Democritus, in which atoms move in straight lines according to physical laws and do not allow for new combinations, and the Epicurean view that atoms sometimes deviate from the norm or ‘swerve’ and thus allow for free will. For Epicurus the atom is self-sufficient, containing its individuality and potential within itself – nature and material objects derive not from the laws of objective reality but from the possibilities of subjective imagination. We cannot know causes, only possibilities, because being is determined by consciousness.

At that time Marx was a radical critic of Hegel, and we can see him using this study of Greek philosophy to orient himself towards topics and debates within German idealism: what is the relationship between thought and being, between subject and object, and what is the nature of scientific inquiry? The position of Democritus and Epicurus following the death of Aristotle parallels Marx’s own position following the death of Hegel.

Hegel was critical of Epicurus’s atomism for encouraging individual action against the unity of society and saw his system as sensuous and unphilosophical. Marx, armed with Hegel’s dialectics but suspicious of his idealism, goes further. For him, Epicurus differs from Democritus in allowing for individual freedom within a materialist framework, but his freedom and individuality exist in the abstract and seek, like the swerving atoms, to avoid real life. The Epicureans actually set a real-life example, preferring to avoid involvement in politics and live in modest obscurity: the goal of philosophy was a particular state of mind: ataraxia, or tranquility, freedom from care. In Marx’s view, by contrast, “abstract individuality is freedom from existence, not freedom in existence.”

Of course, Marx is ultimately interested, not in a point of Greek philosophy, but in forming his own worldview and working out how it relates to the Hegel-dominated ideas of his time. And the issues raised in the dissertation drew him onto a collision course with idealism.

Marx claims to have solved “a heretofore unsolved problem in the history of Greek philosophy”, namely the existence of profound differences between Democritus and Epicurus, and exposes long-standing misconceptions about Epicurus, characteristically sweeping away cobwebs and rubbish to get to what he considers the true heart of the matter. He praises Epicurus as “the greatest representative of Greek Enlightenment” because of his objections to superstition. It is clear from his foreword to the dissertation that Marx was already forming a view of the role of philosophy and literature in facing down shopworn ideas, which he declaims in florid language:

As long as a single drop of blood pulses in her world-conquering, absolutely free heart, philosophy will continually cry out to her opponents, with Epicurus: ‘The truly impious man is not he who destroys the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them.’

Philosophy makes no secret of this. The confession of Prometheus: ‘In a word, I detest all the gods’ is her own confession, her own watchword against all the gods of heaven and earth who do not recognise man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity. It will have none other besides.

But to the pitiful March hares who rejoice at the apparently worsened civil position of philosophy, she repeats what Prometheus said to Hermes, the servant of the gods:

Be sure of this, I would not change my evil plight for your servility. It is better to be slave to the rock than to serve Father Zeus as his faithful messenger.

Prometheus is the foremost saint and martyr in the philosopher’s calendar.[5]

For Marx, the mythical Greek figure of Prometheus – the Titan who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to humankind – becomes a symbol of radical inquiry, with Zeus standing in for Hegel in particular and received opinion in general. The quotations of Prometheus are from Aeschylus’ tragedy Prometheus Bound, but as S.S. Prawer points out, the idea that human self-consciousness was higher than the gods could hardly be what Aeschylus intended in his tragedy. Through the filter of 19th century German philosophy, Marx is recasting, like so many before and after him, a Greek myth to suit a contemporary purpose.

Early though the dissertation is – Marx was only 23 when he wrote it, and had yet to formulate his revolutionary theory – it prefigures some of the later themes of his materialism, such as his dialectics, criticism of religion and materialist epistemology. In Mikhail Lifschitz’s words, it reveals “the abyss between the last representative of classical bourgeois philosophy and the founder-to-be of scientific socialism” [6] – an abyss given form through ancient Greek philosophy.

Marx would continue to read and admire classical authors throughout his life, though he never descended into the boring, sanitised neo-classicism of academia. Evidence for the breadth of Marx’s reading of ancient authors is scattered through his letters. The historian and Marxist G.E.M. de Ste. Croix gives us a flavour:

On 8 March 1855 we find him saying in a latter to Engels, ‘A little time ago I went through Roman history again up to the Augustan era’; on 27 February 1861 he writes again to Engels, ‘As a relaxation in the evenings I have been reading Appian on the Roman civil wars, in the original Greek’; and some weeks later, on 29 May 1861, he tells Lassalle that in order to dispel the serious ill-humour arising from what he describes, in a mixture of German and English, as ‘mein in every respect unsettled situation’, he is reading Thucydides, and he adds (in German) ‘These ancient writers at least remain ever new.’[7]

Marx had a prodigious memory: Marx’s daughter Eleanor Marx commented to Wilhelm Liebknecht that he ‘could recite whole cantos of Homer from beginning to end.’ [8] Evidence of this proliferates in his writings. De Ste. Croix observes:

Scattered through the writings of Marx are a remarkable number of allusions to Greek and Roman history, literature and philosophy... he frequently quotes Greek authors (more often in the original than in translation), as well as Latin authors, in all sorts of contexts: Aeschylus, Appian, Aristotle, Athenaeus, Democritus, Diodorus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Epicurus, Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer, Isocrates, Lucian, Pindar, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Sophocles, Strabo, Thucydides, Xenophon and others… After his doctoral dissertation Marx never had occasion to write at length about the ancient world, but again and again he will make some penetrating remark that brings out something of value.

In 1842, through his contact with the Left Hegelians, Marx planned a treatise that would compare ancient Greek and Christian art, and trace a path to the modern Romantics. No copy of this has come down to us, but its probable line of argument has been reconstructed by Lifschitz based upon the views of the Left Hegelians and Marx’s notes on his reading. According to Lifschitz, Marx would have argued that whereas ancient art was realistic and plastic, with an intense interest in artistic form growing organically out of the human imagination, the Christian religious outlook was based upon a paralysing fear of God and on submission. Christian art either lost its sense of artistic form through excessive zeal, or sought simple symbolism and abstraction.

In studying the nature of religion Marx introduces fetishism, a concept that in reworked form would later take on great importance in his economic studies. A fetish object becomes identified with its god – it is not a mere symbol but the god actually lives in the image. “The fundamental thesis of the treatise on Christian art,” Lifschitz concludes, “was thus the antithesis between the ancient principle of form and the fetishistic worship of materiality.”

Marx is thinking in this treatise, not only of Christian art of the post-classical period, but of contemporary capitalism. He has still to develop his mature theory of commodity fetishism, i.e. the mistaking of human social relationships for relationships between things. But he is almost certainly thinking back to his reading from 1841-2 when he writes in Capital that “we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world” [9] in order to understand fetishism.

In the treatise on religion and art, it seems that Marx sought to criticise Christian culture as a step backwards from the artistic standards set by ancient Greek culture.

There are many subsequent examples of Marx’s engagement with classical antiquity, and we can’t look at them all here. The most significant influence by far was Aristotle, whom Marx considered ‘the greatest thinker of antiquity’ [10]. Aristotle is referenced in the doctoral thesis, in the Grundrisse, multiple times in Capital, etc, and helped Marx create his own framework for understanding class, politics, ethics, materialism and citizenship.[11]

Marx was confronted by the 19th-century realities of an alienated urban landscape – utilitarianism, individualism and exploitation – and like many of his contemporaries he looked to ancient Greece for an alternative society of self-realisation, sensuous art and active citizenship. The ‘grecomania’ of the bourgeoisie bore only a passing resemblance to the historical reality of the squabbling city-states built on slave labour. But unlike many of his intellectual peers, Marx did not relate to Greece as a utopian, idealist or reactionary. Rather, he used it to throw light both upon the experiences and relationships of his own times and upon how human society might advance to something better in the future.

[1] This was particularly visible in Berlin, where the work of the neo-classical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel – including the Brandenburg Gate, which is a copy of the Propylaea of the Acropolis – helped earn the city the name ‘Athens on the Spree’.
[2] Lukács, Goethe and his Age (1968).
[3] Referred to in a letter to his father in November 1837.
[4] Marx, ‘The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’ (1841). We have this thesis, which earned Marx his PhD, only in an incomplete form. Marx also planned a longer work on Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophy which was never written.
[5] Marx, op. cit. Translation from S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (1978).
[6] Mikhail Lifschitz, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1933).
[7] G.E.M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981).
[8] Cited in S.S. Prawer, op. cit.
[9] Marx, Chapter 1 of Capital, vol. 1, (1867).
[10] Marx, op. cit., Chapter 15.
[11] I refer readers interested in Marx’s debt to Aristotle to George E. McCarthy, Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth-Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity (1992). G.E.M. de Ste. Croix discusses the resemblance between Aristotle and Marx’s methods in The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, pp.74-80.

The rise of ancient Greece

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:31:00 +0000

When Edgar Allan Poe referred to “the glory that was Greece”[1], he was using language typical of both popular and academic studies which has only recently gone out of fashion. In The Story of Art, E. H. Gombrich considers Classical Greece ‘the great awakening’; others routinely use such phrases as the ‘the Greek miracle’. The implication of this language is that Greece is a beacon of special enlightenment and genius. Marx asserted in an early essay that “among the peoples of the ancient world, Greece and Rome are certainly countries of the highest ‘historical culture’”[2]. The praise for contemporary cultures like Neo-Babylon or Persia is rarely so extravagant.

The ‘Charioteer of Delphi’, a bronze sculpture from 474 BCE.

The cultural legacy of the rocky tip of the Balkan peninsula to Europe and to the rest of the world is indeed impressive. Whenever we watch the Olympic Games, or watch a tragedy, or vote in an election, we owe a debt to the ancient Greeks, and European art from the Renaissance to modernism and beyond is steeped in Greek stories, characters and styles. The West presents the Greeks – their philosophical outlook, their art and architecture, and their politics – as the ancestors of its own civilisation. For centuries, Western educators assumed that familiarity with the Greco-Roman legacy was essential to a proper education.

The phase of Greek [3] culture generally recognised as the most important, known as ‘Classical’ Greece, flowered in the fifth century BCE, primarily in Athens. This ‘awakening’ was relatively short-lived and geographically limited. In the subsequent centuries up to the present, Greek art never again achieved a comparable importance or influence. Why did it flower at that particular time? Were the Greeks more gifted than other ancient cultures? Why did their ‘glory’ fade?

We shall explore various aspects of ancient Greek art and culture, and of subsequent eras’ relationship with it, in the next series of articles. To begin, let us take a broad look at its historical background.

The birth of ancient Greek culture

Classical Greece did not spring fully-formed from the hills of Attica. It followed centuries of civilisation in the Aegean, most prominently the Cycladic, Minoan and Mycenaean cultures of the Bronze Age, and cross-pollinations from north Africa and the east.

As we have seen, the Minoan culture peaked at around 2000 BCE and was overrun by the Mycenaeans in 1450 BCE.

‘Mycenaean’ is the name generally given to the warlike Greek culture of the Bronze Age, named after Mycenae, a city in the Peloponnese in southern Greece, but actually extant across Greece including Athens and Thebes [4]. Unlike the Minoans, who influenced them heavily, the Mycenaeans were Greeks – the translation of their Linear B script in the 1950s revealed that it records an early form of Greek. The frescoes, pottery, palaces, grave goods and other treasures created across the span of Mycenaean influence in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean indicate a flourishing and significant civilisation, a warrior society whose strong fortifications place it at an opposite pole to the apparently peaceful Minoans. It was the Mycenaeans or ‘Akhaians’ who, according to Homer’s Iliad, launched a mighty war against the rival power of Troy.

Artist’s impression of the megaron or great hall of the Mycenaean palace at Pylos, destroyed in around 1200 BCE.

This rich culture disintegrated during the Bronze Age collapse in the 12th century BCE. All of the palaces were destroyed and most sites were abandoned, indicating a massive depopulation. We have already traced the collapse to a systemic crisis in the ancient mode of production. But precisely how the effects unfolded in this region is still debated by historians and archaeologists. The Greeks’ own tradition, still respected by many historians, blames Dorians invading from the north, but the archaeological record is unclear. Rebellious mercenaries, the Sea Peoples or Mycenaean kings fighting each other, or a combination of these, might be responsible.

The level of material culture in the Aegean nose-dived. The wealth and ambit of the cities shrank, foreign trade and the arts withered, and writing disappeared entirely. Greek culture existed at only a basic level and would not recover for 400 years, leading some to refer to this period as a ‘Dark Age’. (That label is sometimes frowned on, but seems appropriate compared to what came before and after.) No wonder, perhaps, that the Greeks would celebrate the prosperous pre-crisis times in folklore and mythology – the literary works of Homer and Hesiod looked back to the Bronze Age as a golden or ‘heroic’ age, compared to which the present measured poorly.

Archaic Greece

The devastation of Bronze Age Greece created the space for a new civilisation to emerge. Archaeological evidence shows that the economy was reviving by the 8th century. Greek regions developed their production of pottery, oil, textiles and wine for trade. Pottery decoration becomes more sophisticated, and iron goods are of better quality. In 776 BCE the Olympic games were founded, a signal that a new period was beginning.

70% of the land in Greece, a country of mountains, valleys and upland plains, cannot be farmed, and the best of what remained was claimed by the aristocracy. With limited land on one hand yet abundant natural harbours and islands on the other, and possibly spurred by drought and famine, the Greeks became sailors and traders, spreading out from their homeland to colonise the Mediterranean and beyond, from Gibraltar in the west to the Black Sea in the east, and most importantly the western rim of Asia Minor (the Ionian Greeks). This process surely explains why some of the Greeks’ earliest stories, such as Jason and the Argonauts or Homer’s The Odyssey, were accounts of great sea voyages.

This period of expansion and recovery, from about 800-490 BCE, is known as the Archaic period.

A tantalising symbol of this new era was unearthed by archaeologists at Pithekoussai on the island of Ischia. It is a clay drinking cup from about 750-700 BCE, decorated in the simple, abstract Geometric style that dominated Greek pottery from the Dark Ages until around 700 BCE. What makes it interesting is a three-line inscription in Greek scratched on the side, slightly fragmented through wear, which translates as something like this:

I am Nestor’s cup, good to drink from.
Whoever drinks this cup empty, straight away
the desire for beautiful-crowned Aphrodite will seize him.

This is possibly, though not necessarily, the first literary allusion – in The Iliad, Nestor is the aged king of Pylos who accompanies the Greek army. Along with the ‘Dipylon inscription’ on another pottery vessel, the so-called Nestor’s Cup is one of the oldest surviving examples of the Greek alphabet. This alphabet, still used today for contemporary Greek, was not related to Linear B – instead it is an adaptation of the alphabet of the Phoenicians. Ischia was an early Greek colony, but it had a Phoenician population too, profiting from its harbour and trade, and the two cultures were in regular contact. Somewhere in the Aegean, from probably around 800 BCE, this meeting of cultures ended 400 years of Greek illiteracy.

Towns like Sybaris in Italy and Syracuse in Sicily became very wealthy, but it was the Ionian Greeks in Asia Minor who were the leaders of the economic and cultural recovery. After the Lydians minted the first coinage, trade became easier, and the eastern Greek colonies – Samos, Ephesus, Miletus – prospered even more than the mainland, including in cultural production.

A new politics

The basic form of urban civilisation in ancient Greece, the polis or small city-state, appeared during the Archaic era in this context of trade, coinage, literacy and overseas expansion. By the end of the 6th century the Greek towns numbered perhaps 1500, strung along the coastline “like frogs around a pond” [5], and there was great diversity amongst them. Unlike modern towns they were centres not for industry but for landowners and farmers, still organised on a traditional tribal structure. Wealth, including the best land, was still dominated by the aristocracy, and the masses were compelled to make their living on the least fertile soil.

The grim life of the Greek peasant was lamented in Hesiod’s poem Works and Days, written in about 700 BCE, in which the writer instructs his brother Perses in how to live a just life and exhorts the common people to be satisfied with moderation. For Hesiod, humanity has passed through five ages, and the present age of iron is the worst of them all. It is reasonable to interpret his text – the product of a ‘long and hard career scratching a living from the soil in miserable Askra’ [6] – in the context of the agricultural crisis that is probably responsible for the mass migrations from the mainland.

The Greek migrations are sometimes cast in a heroic light of exploration and discovery, but Plato suggested a rather different interpretation:

When men who have nothing, and are in want of food, show a disposition to follow their leaders in an attack on the property of the rich – these, who are the natural plague of the state, are sent away by the legislator in a friendly spirit as far as he is able; and this dismissal of them is euphemistically termed a colony.[7]

During the pre-literate period the tribal nobles responsible for the military overthrew the kings to become the dominant force during the recovery. From 650 BCE, populist leaders representing the new wealth of the economic recovery began to rise up and challenge the aristocracy. These leaders are known as ‘tyrants’, but the term did not become perjorative until the democratic context of the later Classical era. A tyrant was simply someone who seized power unconstitutionally, and he generally presented himself as a champion of the people to mobilise the peasantry as a power base. These tyrants in different cities did not of course follow a single blueprint, but they were broadly progressive. Pheidon of Argos established a system of weights and measures; Cypselus of Corinth divided the nobles’ land among the people; Peisistratos in Athens encouraged public works, industry and the arts. It is because of Peisistratos that the first standard editions of The Iliad and The Odyssey were written down, and to create employment he launched a building programme to beautify Athens. He redistributed land, reformed the coinage, built alliances with other states, and encouraged economic growth by offering agricultural loans.

The effect of tyranny was to limit the power of the nobility, encourage trade and new colonies, reform agriculture and improve the conditions of the peasantry, not to mention the benefits of patronage for art, architecture, music and literature. The aristocracy had proved vulnerable, in Perry Anderson’s words, to the ‘combined pressure of rural discontent from below and recent fortunes from above’ [8]. Tyranny contained its own contradiction: by breaking the power of the aristocracy and appealing to the commercial class and the hoplites – self-financed citizen infantry – the tyrants were creating a space for forces that would turn against them. It was thus the rule of the tyrants that marked the decisive transition towards the democratic polis of the Classical period.

The Archaic period saw an art emerge which, though influenced by the near east and Egypt, we may consider typically Greek. To the names of Homer and Hesiod we may add those of Archilochus of Paros, Alcaeus of Mytilene and Sappho, the famous woman poet, who raised lyric poetry to a new standard. Pottery moved away from the abstract motifs of the Geometric style, using a variety of techniques and portraying human subjects again in everyday and mythological scenes. Architects laid the principles of the distinctive Greek temple, and sculptors moved away from their Egyptian models towards an early naturalism, producing the kouros and kore figures that filled cemeteries and sanctuaries. The creativity of this period makes the term ‘Archaic’ an unhappy one, with its implication of primitiveness. But the label, artificial though such terms tend to be, refers to a relationship to the so-called Classical period: for the creative peak was still to come.

Classical Greece

The fragmentation of Greece into small city-states and the unsteady balance of class forces led to a fractious and unusually vibrant political life. In Athens, this culminated in a remarkable experiment.

The process began with Solon, whose reforms in around 600 BCE attempted to steer a course between debt-ridden peasants and disenfranchised traders on one hand, and the oligarchy on the other. After Peisistratos and the overthrow of his successors, the aristocracy tried to prevent reform, but was defeated by popular opposition led by the aristocrat Kleisthenes. In 508-7 BCE Kleisthenes made a decisive revolutionary step, taking Solon’s reforms as its foundation.

This next stage of the process did away with old clan loyalties by introducing new tribes based upon deme or place of residence. A council (boule) selected by lot proposed agendas for a voting assembly (ekklesia) composed of all citizens. This assembly became the keystone of a democracy based not upon elected representatives as in the modern West but on direct rule by the demos, or people, themselves. Officials were chosen by lot or election, and terms were kept short to keep offices under control. Leaders thought to be possible tyrants in the making could be ostracised, i.e. exiled for ten years, by popular vote.

By the 5th century BCE, Athens was the economic focus of the Aegean, a maritime power [9] funded by the silver mines at Laureion, and the trading activity of thousands of metics, or foreigners. And it was the most politically advanced city in the world.

The stage on the Pnyx, a hill in central Athens, where orators would address the Assembly. Photo: Panegyrics of Granovetter.

Democracy had a limited franchise – women, slaves and foreigners were excluded, along with other restrictions, so that out of an estimated population of 250,000 for Athens and the region of Attica, only 30,000 male citizens could take part. The aristocracy was still privileged and held a lot of behind-the-scenes control. Nonetheless, working people, by which we mostly mean the small farmers who made up the majority of the population, held real power in a system that in some respects was more advanced than modern bourgeois democracy.

Despite the quarrelsomeness of the city-states, the Greeks recognised a certain common identity, as expressed at the Olympic games or in common respect for the oracular site of Delphi. This potential for unity was briefly realised by war. When Athens and Eretria intervened to help the Ionian Greek city of Miletus in an uprising against Persia, Greece was drawn into a confrontation with the Persian empire. After two Persian invasions, a league of Greek city-states under Athenian and Spartan leadership won victory at Plataea in 479 BCE. The end of the wars with Persia left Athens at the height of its prestige, but Greece quickly lost its new-found unity with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, in which Athens and Sparta competed for dominance.

There was no single pattern of development across the Greek world, because the fragmentation of the Bronze Age collapse, combined with the mountainous geography, had resulted in a divided Greece composed of independent city states that often saw each other as rivals. Whereas Athens increasingly limited the power of its aristocracy, thrived on international trade and eventually invented the first democracy, Sparta, the other city that had most influence on Greek history, took a different road. Sparta was never a major trading centre. Its major source of wealth was an enslaved population of fellow-Greeks in Laconia and neighbouring Messenia, and it sought to keep control of this large and sometimes rebellious population through a ruthless military system. With a pioneering constitution that was both radical and conservative, the aristocracy never faced the challenge of a tyrant – let alone democracy, which Sparta viewed with suspicion.

It was conservative Sparta that eventually won an hollow victory in the Peloponnesian War. But as full-time soldiers, the Spartans had little time or use for art. Their relative cultural poverty means that Athens has had by far the greater artistic legacy.

The Acropolis of Athens, topped by the Parthenon.

For out of the cauldron of economic growth and new political structures in Greece, Athens became the centre of an unprecedented cultural flowering. (We shall examine the causes of this in more detail elsewhere.) Greek philosophy and science questioned the natural world, politics, and the nature of humanity; thinkers like Democritus introduced startling scientific theories, such as the existence of atoms. Poets and historians, partly inspired by a rich and poetic mythology, wrote a variety of literature, from the poems of Pindar to the Histories of Herodotus. Theatre reached a new intensity and profundity in the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and many others. Sculptors created a new way of seeing the human body, producing such masterpieces as the Riace bronzes and Parthenon marbles. In pottery, a shift to the red-figure technique allowed vase painters a new detail, liveliness and realism. Architects laid down traditions for the design of monumental buildings which reached their high point in the Parthenon. This remarkable body of achievements make fifth century Greece one of the most creative periods in history. Even if the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War signals the end of its ‘golden age’, there was more to come: Plato and Aristotle, Apelles and Protogenes, Praxiteles and Lysippos, were all active in the 4th century.

Athens’ achievements were recognised in its own day. After the city’s surrender in 404 BCE to the Spartan general Lysander, the Spartans and their allies discussed its fate and, according to Plutarch, some proposed dire punishments. However the outcome is revealing:

And some state, in fact, the proposal was made in the congress of the allies, that the Athenians should all be sold as slaves; on which occasion, Erianthus, the Theban, gave his vote to pull down the city, and turn the country into sheep-pasture; yet afterwards, when there was a meeting of the captains together, a man of Phocis, singing the first chorus in Euripides’ Electra, which begins:

Electra, Agamemnon’s child, I come
Unto thy desert home,

they were all melted with compassion, and it seemed to be a cruel deed to destroy and pull down a city which had been so famous, and produced such men.[10]

If Plutarch is to be believed, it was this appeal for love of Athens’ art that saved it from destruction.

Conclusion

The Bronze Age collapse did not usher in a new mode of production, but the devastation created the conditions for a new phase of growth in the Iron Age. The trader Phoenicians exported civilisation around the Mediterranean and founded Carthage; the old Mesopotamian empires were succeeded by the Persians; the Greeks migrated to new trading colonies and refounded their culture, and under Alexander would export it by force of arms to the limits of the known world.

Yet Athens’ star would not shine so bright again. In the fourth century BCE, the focus of power in Greece shifted to Macedon. Under Alexander the Great, Greek culture was exported across a vast though short-lived empire that stretched from Egypt to the borders of India. This ‘Hellenistic’ period lasted until the rise of Rome as a world power. Thus aristocratic counter-revolution put an end to democracy. Yet even after Greece was absorbed into the Roman empire in 146 BCE, its culture persevered. As great admirers of Greece, the Romans plundered and copied its art, enticed its craftspeople and intellectuals to Rome, and acted as a mediator through which Greek culture survived even into the Christian age – and long after the creative spark had shrunk to more modest proportions in its homeland.

[1] The quotation is from the revised 1845 version of his poem ‘To Helen’.
[2] Marx, ‘The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung’ (1842).
[3] The word ‘Greek’ derives from the Latin ‘Graeci’, i.e. our terminology has been mediated by the Romans. The people English-speakers call Greeks called themselves ‘Hellenes’ and their nation, ‘Hellas’.
[4] There are two ancient cities known to the English-speaking world as ‘Thebes’, one in Greece and one in Egypt. The latter was named ‘Thebai’ by the ancient Greeks – the Egyptians knew it by several names, the modern one being Luxor.
[5] Plato, Phaedo (360 BCE).
[6] From the introduction by Dorothea Wender to the Penguin edition of Hesiod and Theognis (1986).
[7] Plato, Book 5 of Laws (360 BCE).
[8] Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974).
[9] The building of a fleet on the urging of Themistocles gave further strength to democracy, as it placed part of Athens’ military power in the hands of the poor – the oarsmen of the triremes. The aristocracy opposed the fleet for this reason.
[10] Plutarch, Lysander (75 CE).

Gil Scott-Heron documentary

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sun, 29 May 2011 10:30:00 +0000

The 1996 BBC Four documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, on the life and work of Gil Scott-Heron, has been made available on YouTube. I reproduce all four parts here.

Credit is due here.

Find the playlist on YouTube here.

Gil Scott-Heron, 1949–2011

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sat, 28 May 2011 09:24:00 +0000

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In four parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner,
because the revolution will not be televised, brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color TV into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able to predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers on the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers on the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a red, black and
green liberation jumpsuit that he has been saving
for just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally got down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock
news and no pictures of hairy-armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb or
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdinck, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, the tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers;
The revolution will be live.

In memory of Gil Scott-Heron, who died yesterday.

The iron revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Wed, 11 May 2011 14:54:00 +0000

The production of iron began some time in the second millenium BCE in western to central Asia. Its precise history is not clear, but the most recent evidence tells us it could date as far back as 2000 BCE in Anatolia, 1800 BCE in India and 1500 BCE in Africa, suggesting that it arose in various regions independently and was then diffused from these centres, not appearing in Britain for example until it was imported as a new technology around 700 BCE.

Although iron was known to human cultures as early as the second millenium BCE, its mass production was only possible with the invention of the bloomery. This was a furnace capable of achieving the high temperatures required to smelt it. A key impetus to creating this technology was the shortage of copper and tin following the Bronze Age collapse.

Smelting is the process by which iron is extracted from iron ore: the intense temperatures make the iron separate from the rest of the ore in a mass known as a ‘bloom’. The ancient blacksmith would hammer this mass to knock out cinders and slag and produce wrought iron, a hard malleable substance ideal for making tools. In its natural form iron is too soft to be very useful, but when combined with carbon it becomes harder than bronze. The bloomery allowed the controlled absorption of carbon by burning charcoal.

The working of iron also allowed the production of steel, an alloy known to the ancient world in which iron is mixed with carbon. The oldest example we have was found at a site in Turkey: thought to be part of a knife, it dates to around 2000 BCE. Steel has the hardness of cast iron (which has a high carbon content), and the malleability of wrought iron, making it the most useful iron product, but ancient technology could not produce it efficiently. Steel did not displace iron as the dominant material of civilisation until well into the modern era, when the Industrial Revolution introduced new methods for its mass production.

Iron did not sweep instantly across the ancient world, but over the next several centuries it spread at different times into different regions. There is a gap between the dates of the first iron use and the dates that a culture is considered to have entered the Iron Age, i.e. when iron displaced bronze, wood and stone as the principal material for tools and weapons.

Iron had a number of advantages. It was harder than bronze, making it more durable and much more effective for implements, transforming agricultural productivity through the introduction of iron axes and iron ploughs. Even in the Bronze Age, farmers often used wood and stone tools because bronze was not strong enough to work the earth. Iron was also more abundant than bronze, making it cheaper. Bronze was an expensive preserve of the ruling class, used for weapons, statues and luxury goods while the toiling masses remained dependent upon wood and stone. Iron was technology for the masses – every village could support its own blacksmith.

The superiority of iron weapons is sometimes given as a possible cause of the Bronze Age collapse, but it seems that the use of iron was not widespread until a period roughly contemporaneous with or after the collapse. It seems more correct to see the mass production of iron as humanity’s response to the crisis of productivity that had caused such a profound faltering and rolling back of society. The advent of mass-produced iron was a revolutionary forward step for human culture, helping to forge new social relations and forms out of the tottering structures of the Bronze Age. The comparatively limited civilisations of that period, built upon key fertile centres such as the Indus Valley and Mesopotamia, could now be superceded by more expansive ones fuelled by bigger surpluses, productivity and populations: such as Assyria, Persia and Rome.

Publication notice

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Wed, 11 May 2011 14:23:00 +0000

My article on the Minoans has been published in the Greek journal Marxist Thought, Volume 2, May–August 2011.

http://www.marxistikiskepsi.gr/ (in Greek)

Crisis and revolution: from bronze to iron

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Wed, 11 May 2011 11:01:00 +0000

For now truly is a race of iron, and men never rest from labour and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night; and the gods shall lay sore trouble upon them.
- Hesiod, Works and Days

In the second millenium BCE, human culture produced another of those revolutionary leaps which have driven its development since it first appeared. Yet the leap was preceded by a fall.

We have discussed the broad pattern of development of human culture since the last Ice Age. In some areas, notably the Near East, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers responded to climatic change by becoming Neolithic farmers, massively increasing productivity by domesticating animals and cultivating plant foods such as cereals. By the eighth millenium BCE, agricultural societies were building urban centres like Jericho and Jarmo. Neolithic settlements sprang up in key centres like Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria and the Levant. These peoples farmed milk, meat and grain, mastered pottery, weaving and spinning, and built permanent dwellings with wood, mud brick, plaster and stone. The social surplus allowed the upkeep of specialists, leading to greater sophistication in technique, e.g. in making weapons and tools, ploughs and wheeled carts. The sophistication of these cultures is well-attested by towns like Çatalhöyük, in which we see wall-paintings and sculpture alongside metalworking, religion, town planning, animal breeding and foreign trade. From the seventh millenium BCE, copper was being smelted to produce metal tools, and in around 3000 BCE the addition of tin gave society the harder and longer-lasting bronze.

By transforming nature, humanity was gradually taking its destiny into its own hands.

By the third millenium BCE, Bronze Age cultures were resolving the limitations of Neolithic culture through the Urban Revolution. Long distance trade, literacy, weights and measures, irrigation and land reclamation brought further advances in productivity. Civilisations flowered, defended by strong walls and governed by ruling classes – kings, aristocrats and priests served by bureaucracies and armies, all supported by the surplus produced by the agricultural workers who made up the great majority of the population. The demand for trade led the Near Eastern cultures to expand their contacts, setting up the cultural and economic routes that exported the Bronze Age to the Aegean, north Africa, and beyond.

The great cities of the Bronze Age are typified by the city-state of Ugarit, a commercial centre on the Syrian coast. Thousands of surviving texts attest to the great variety of peoples who lived there: Cretans, Cypriots, Hittites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Hurrians. It produced dyed linen and wool, tools, weapons, oils and wine. It was home to a great variety of craftspeople from potters and smiths to scribes and sculptors. Its people built libraries and palaces, created literary myths such as the Cycle of Baal and the epics of Keret and Aqhat, and traded with the great cultures of the Mediterranean. It was a sophisticated, international and wealthy city.

Yet in about 1200 BCE Ugarit was sacked and destroyed. It was one of many cities and states overthrown or abandoned during what historian Robert Drews described as “arguably the worst disaster in ancient history, even more calamitous than the collapse of the western Roman Empire” [1] – the so-called Bronze Age Collapse.

Crisis

From 1200-1100 BCE, the late Bronze Age cultures based around the eastern Mediterranean suffered a profound crisis. The geographical scale of the reversal was exceptional. The Hittites and Mitanni in Anatolia, the Minoans and Mycenaeans in Greece and many major cities in the Eastern Mediterranean – including Ugarit and Troy – were dramatically set back or completely disappeared, and at the close of the New Kingdom Egypt was exhausted and declining [2]. There is plentiful archaeological evidence of this upheaval, such as destruction levels revealing large layers of ash, declines in pottery production and quality, sites depopulated or abandoned, and the breaking-off of written records. In some areas, no new culture replaced the old devastated one. Particularly in Greece and Anatolia, it took centuries for civilisation to recover from a ‘Dark Age’ of stagnancy and illiteracy.

There has been a great deal of speculation by historians about what lay behind this disastrous crisis. The theories include natural disaster, climate change, new military technology, mass migration or a general ‘systems collapse’.

One of the more mysterious elements was the appearance in the 13th century BCE in the eastern Mediterranean of the so-called Sea Peoples: displaced populations moving eastwards looking for new lands and razing the cultures that stood in their way. The source of the name ‘the Sea Peoples’ is an Egyptian inscription from the mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, which depicts Rameses III defeating an attempted invasion from the sea. It is probably inaccurate to see the Sea Peoples as a single group with a single origin. Rather, they were disparate peoples displaced from various parts of the Mediterranean.

Preziosi and Hitchcock [3] suggest for example that the Mycenaeans were overthrown by forces from inside or outside, perhaps mercenaries recruited from surrounding ‘barbarian’ peoples, and forced to migrate, following the established trade routes eastwards, displacing other peoples in a kind of domino effect. There are connections between the material culture of the Aegean and of the Philistines of the Levant, who are believed to have been among the Sea Peoples. The body of evidence for these links includes literary references (e.g. the Bible, which associates Crete with the Philistines) as well as correlations between pottery motifs, weapons, headdresses, burial practices, and more.

But the phenomenon of the Sea Peoples does not really answer the question of the crisis. Were they a cause of the crisis, or a symptom of it? What caused these peoples to migrate in the first place? There is no certainty among archaeologists about interpreting the incomplete evidence. The most likely explanation, formulated by Gordon Childe as early as the 1930s, is strangely absent from the current debate.

A dead end for class society

Across history, humans had found new ways to transform their societies in order to meet the needs created by new conditions. Hunter gatherers had responded to the end of the Ice Age with the Neolithic Revolution, and to the new demands of settled life – e.g. soil degradation, centralisation and technology – with the Urban Revolution.

Broadly the late Bronze Age cultures were commanded by powerful ruling classes commanding centralised states with bureaucracies, organised around the transfer of wealth to themselves from the masses. This meant an increased exploitation of the peasant cultivators, and their reduction to serfdom or even slavery. As Childe pointed out, “such concentration was probably essential to ensure the production of the requisite surplus resources and to make these available for effective social use” [4], i.e. for all its evident evils, class society was a progressive step forwards for humanity.

But class society would become a brake on development. As Childe argued:

Progress before the [Urban] revolution had consisted in improvements in productive processes made presumably by the actual producers, and made moreover in the teeth of superstitions that discouraged all innovations as dangerous.

But by the revolution the actual producers, formerly so fertile in invention, were reduced to the position of ‘lower classes’. The ruling classes who now emerged owed their power largely to the exploitation of just those hampering superstitions.

By around 2500 BCE early civilisation’s wave of technological innovations – irrigation, the plough, the sailing boat, the harnessing of animals, the wheel, copper, bricks, writing, bronze [5] – had dried up. Elites that drew heavily upon superstition to justify themselves had no interest in further investigation of the natural world. They could also exploit big reserves of labour power and saw no need for improvements in technique. But the great cultures of the 13th century BCE were confronted with very high costs in maintaining their bureaucracies, military and extravagant monarchies.

Instead of investing in technology and increasing production, these ruling classes expended immense resources on tombs, public works, military adventures and luxury consumption. Much as we may admire achievements such as the Pyramids, their cost was extraordinary, and they contributed little to the progressive development of society as a whole.

The ruling class, itself the product of a progressive advance – class society – was now holding civilisation back from the further advances needed to feed the elite’s demands for resources. In short, the Urban Revolution, which had allowed a leap forwards from the limitations of Neolithic culture, had an internal contradiction and was beginning to be constrained by its own limitations. As Marx put it:

At a certain stage in their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations which have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters.[6]

With the strain this contradiction imposed on society as a whole, a shift in circumstances – a drought, a migration, a rising of a ‘fringe’ people [7] – could easily tip society into crisis. Indeed, there is strong evidence of widespread drought in this period.

In a later age, a new mode of production, capitalism, could develop within the framework of feudalism. There was no such alternative available to the Bronze Age. Social forces such as the peasant cultivators or merchants were incapable of taking over the organisation of those cultures, which were therefore stuck in a cycle of rise and fall. As one culture fell apart, another took its place, sometimes by force – only for this to fall apart in its turn. This pattern is not of course limited to 1200 BCE, but during the Bronze Age Collapse it became generalised, applying not simply to individual cultures but to the broader civilised world. With no possibility of a revolutionary step forwards in the class struggle, there remained only “the mutual ruin of the contending classes”.[8] The apparent barbarism of the Sea Peoples, perhaps themselves displaced by the crisis, might be one expression of this.

The analysis in this article might be seen as a reinvention of the theory of ‘systems collapse’, currently the most credible theory amongst archaeologists, but from a Marxist perspective. In my view, ‘causes’ such as drought, the migration of peoples, new weapons technology and so on were important aspects of the crisis but the ultimate explanation is more fundamental than these or a mere combination of them.

The effects of the collapse were of course uneven. Although Egypt entered a period of decline, it retained a cultural continuity between the Bronze and Iron Ages. In other regions the change was more stark. In the Aegean the late Bronze Age was followed by a Dark Age, when the loss of long-distance trade and the breakdown of great bureaucratic states caused a fragmentation into smaller, more backward societies. This had a significant affect upon artistic production. Monumental buildings were no longer built, pottery designs became simpler, the Linear B script fell into disuse, craft output fell and the resources spent on art declined.

Though the collapse was a period of destruction and decline, there was also a positive opportunity for rebirth. The loss by Egypt of its territories in the Levant and the disintegration of the Hittite empire in Anatolia created the space for new, smaller cultures like the Phoenicians, inventors of the alphabet, or the Lydians, inventors of coinage, to emerge as commercial powers. And in time the recovery would bring a new wave of cultures. Among them was a culture whose art is often held up as one of humanity’s highest achievements – the ancient Greeks – whom we will examine presently.

Human history was also on the cusp of a new phase of civilisation, characterised by a technology that would change the world: iron.

[1] Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age (1995).
[2] Egypt’s period of decline occasioned the first recorded labour strike in history, when food rations failed to be provided for the skilled artisans in Deir el-Medina.
[3] Donald Preziosi and Louise A. Hitchcock, Aegean Art and Architecture (1999).
[4] Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (1936). This article draws upon Childe’s thesis from chapter 9 on ‘the acceleration and retardation of progress’.
[5] For a fuller list see Childe, op. cit.
[6] Karl Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).
[7] In the process of creating military machines, kings increasingly recruited mercenaries from their frontiers: Libyans and Asiatics for Egypt, peoples from Asia Minor for the Hittites, the Dorians for the Mycenaeans. These ‘fringe’ peoples, armed and organised, acquired the military capacity to bring down their employers.
[8] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).

Totality

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:07:00 +0000

One of the key concepts of advanced materialist thought is the ‘totality’, championed by Hegel and embraced by Marx. We have already touched upon this topic, but it deserves a post of its own.

We could discuss the totality at great length, but the principle is simple.

As a dialectical thinker, Hegel sought to break up the static way of seeing inherited from formal logic. For a full understanding of what is happening, he thought, it is not enough to look at momentary, incomplete or isolated parts of a process. Only the whole was true — a whole which includes within it each of the stages that created it.

The classic bourgeois example of causality was introduced by Hume in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding of 1772: one billiard ball striking another. One ball travels across the billiard table and hits the second, causing the second ball to move. But this is a very limited conception of what is actually happening.

Let’s use an example a little closer to our own interests and ask, what happens when a painter sits down to paint a landscape? The straightforward answer might be that she applies paint to the canvas to create an image, which is correct as far as it goes. However, to truly understand the artistic outcome we must consider a multitude of determinants. One example is the materials used — the paint will behave differently if it is oil-based than if it is acrylic or watercolour. The painter may have good or poor judgement in making her artistic decisions, e.g. which colours to apply, how hard to press the brush, etc — judgements influenced by how experienced she is as well as by any natural prowess. If the weather is different today to how it was yesterday, this may influence her mood or choice of colours, as will her general emotional state of mind. Her materials themselves will vary in quality, not only in terms of whether they are well- or poorly-made but even materials of comparable quality may perform differently according to what they are made of and their design; if the materials are new to the painter, she will judge their ‘performance’ better if she’s had a chance to practice with them than if she’s using them for the first time. If she is creating the image for herself she may approach it differently to one which has been commissioned by a patron, whom she may or may not like or resent.

These are only a few of the most immediate factors at work. We might then draw back and consider her education, the particular social conditioning she receives as a woman, the prevailing artistic trends of the day, and so on. In short, the form concretely taken by her landscape is determined by everything acting upon it. (We may recall here Lenin’s call for ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’, with each force assigned the correct relative weight in the situation.) Thus Terry Eagleton’s comment, which we have quoted before:

To understand King Lear, The Dunciad or Ulysses is therefore to do more than interpret their symbolism, study their literary history and add footnotes about sociological facts which enter into them. It is first of all to understand the complex indirect relations between those works and the ideological worlds they inhabit — relations which emerge not just in ‘themes’ and ‘preoccupations’, but in style, rhythm, image, quality and... form. But we do not understand ideology either unless we grasp the part it plays in the society as a whole — how it consists of a definite, historically relative structure of perception which underpins the power of a particular social class. This is not an easy task, since an ideology is never a simple reflection of a ruling class’s ideas; on the contrary, it is always a complex phenomenon, which may incorporate conflicting, even contradictory, views of the world. To understand an ideology, we must analyse the precise relations between different classes in a society; and to do that means grasping where those classes stand in relation to the mode of production. [1]

Marx did not have time to write big treatises describing his philosophical approach, but his embracing of Hegel’s concept is evident throughout his work. The isolation of particular aspects of nature in order to study them is a necessary part of scientific investigation, but to isolate social phenomena without reference to the larger context to which they belong, and ignore powerful factors which reveal a broader truth, is poor science and will distort one’s analysis.

Thus in a revolutionary situation, the working class is not the only class playing a role. There is a range of class forces, each with a greater or lesser say in how events play out. Or, we misrepresent Marxism if we try to reduce it to a critique of economics, or to a ‘discourse’ that has made an interesting contribution to sociology. You cannot pick and choose the bits of Marxism you like and leave out the commitment to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

It follows that causality in art, too, is not a straightforward linear affair and no artist or work of art exists in glorious isolation. Art is part of the ‘superstructure’ of society and is influenced by the prevailing mode of production and class structures as well as many other things, such as individual personality, psychology, philosophy, religion, sex, the physics of the natural environment, and so on — combinations that will be unique in every case. As Marx put it, “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”[2] Tracing every cause that contributes towards the production of a work of art is impossible. But criticism must try to identify at least the most significant processes acting upon an artist or work if they are to make the most insightful conclusions about them.

[1] Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976).
[2] Marx, ‘The Method of Political Economy’ from Grundrisse.

Wordsworth on revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 21:25:00 +0000

‘Twas in truth an hour
Of universal ferment; mildest men
Were agitated, and commotions, strife
Of passion and opinion, filled the walls
Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.
The soil of common life was, at that time,
Too hot to tread upon.

William Wordsworth, Book IX, The Prelude (1805)

Congratulations to the Egyptian Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 19:58:00 +0000

Latuff: Catapulting Mubarak

Hosni Mubarak resigns as president of Egypt. Now let us hope that Mubarakism goes with him.

Hip-hop and graffiti revolution: a video manifesto

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 17:20:00 +0000

Reproduced from Venezuelanalysis.com

EPATU Manifesto

EPATU stands for Popular School for the Arts and Urban Traditions, but it is also Spanish for ‘Hey you’. The schools, developed jointly with the Venezuelan Ministry for Communes, are non-formal spaces for youth to learn rap, break dancing, graffiti, and DJ, and are an alternative to the consumerism, violence, and criminal life that young people are often exposed to. Instead, the schools focus on developing cultural, social, and collective awareness.

Translation:

Group: We are a School
Male 1: We take on militancy and we learn to be rebels
Male 2: Always inventing
Male 3: From the grassroots
Male 4: Because we base our knowledge on experience and invention
Male 5: Producing
Male 6: And generating a space for thought and discussion
Female 1: Aiming for the inside (of ourselves)
Male 7: And aiming for the endogenous
Male 8: Inviting our people to investigate
Male 9: To discuss, to activate, and to collectivise
Male 10: Making art
Female 2: Inclusive
Female 3: Born from the people
Male 11: What you don’t see in museums
Male 12: Something you want to show.
Male 13: The art of creating and of the collective with the word
Male 14: Painting!
Female 4: With the body, sound, and spirit
Male 15: Accompanying traditions
Male 16: Because rage is our ancestor
Child 1: Blacks!
Child 2: Indigenous!
Child 3: Llaneros (inhabitants of the plains)
Child 4: Gave rise to our arts
Male 17: And they integrated them into one single movement
Male 18: An inheritance transmitted through drums and
Male 19: Decima poetry
Male 20: The beats of Joropo (a Venezuelan dance)
Female 5: And the feet of a dancer
Male 21: That are based on urban expressions
Male 22: That encourage respect for the original (inhabitants)
Female6: For the social
Male 23: For our roots, for the appropriation of spaces that belong to us
Male 24: To achieve the demolishment of the system
Male 25: That oppresses us
Male 26: Making revolution
Male 27: Communicating an alternative for advancing and constructing
Male 28: We do it through communicating
Child 5: (through) the people
Female 7: (through) rebellion
Male 29: (through) what isn’t sold.

Transcription and notes by Tamara Pearson for Venezuelanalysis.com

Latuff on the revolution in Egypt

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:54:00 +0000

Two cartoons by Latuff on the Egyptian Revolution:

And a third in collaboration with Gaber:

More from Latuff:

Support the Arab revolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 19:03:00 +0000

Dominoes, by Leon Kuhn.

The uprisings of the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and other states in the Middle East is one of the most inspiring political developments for decades.

Venezuela celebrates ‘Week of Cuban Culture’ with film, music and dance

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:46:00 +0000

Originally published by venezuelanalysis.com here.

By Juan Reardon

Mérida, January 21st 2011

Yesterday Venezuela began a weeklong celebration of Cuban culture by commemorating the 130th anniversary of Cuban independence hero José Martí’s arrival and extended stay in Caracas from 21 January 1881 to 27 July 1881.

Organized by Venezuela’s Ministry of Culture, the “Week of Cuban Culture” will include numerous film, music, dance, and performance art exhibitions in Caracas as well as the release of recently published books on the historical ties between Venezuela and Cuba.

Venezuela begins a weeklong celebration of Cuban culture. Photo: Wendys Olivo.

“Martí left with his heart filled with Caracas,” said Venezuela’s Minister of Women’s Affairs, Nancy Pérez, during opening ceremonies yesterday.

“But now José Martí has returned in the millions, and thousands of Cubans are in Venezuela doing what Martí professed, they are here in the Missions helping Venezuelans,” she said. Marti is renowned for having said, “Doing is the best way of saying”.

“It is significant that we are here together today, Cubans and Venezuelans, in this homeland that belongs to everyone,” said Cuban ambassador to Venezuela Rogelio Polanco.

“Now, today, we have a Bolivarian Alliance for the People of the Americas (ALBA). Now, today, we have a Bolivarian Revolution that is paving the way for the union of the great homeland. How pleased would Martí be today seeing this [Bolivarian] Revolution and seeing our people fraternally united.”

The Venezuelan and Cuban governments are expected to approve over 200 projects of cooperation in the coming weeks. The projects were to be agreed upon in late 2010, but a second intergovernmental session to finalize details between the two countries was postponed due to record-setting rains in Venezuela.

Apart from yesterday’s opening ceremony, plans for the weeklong event include: a poetic recital entitled ‘Poets Sing to Martí’; the presentation by Doctor Edmundo Aray of the book, Venezuela in Martí, written by Mirla Alcibiades; free screenings of Cuban films for children and adults; as well as the laying of floral arrangements at Caracas’s Plaza Bolívar and Plaza Martí by representatives of the Venezuelan and Cuban governments, including, for example Humberto González, president of Venezuela’s Casa de Nuestra América José Martí and director of Venezuela’s National Library; as well as numerous theatre performances.

The closing event will be held at the Casa de Nuestra América José Martí on January 29, celebrating the 120th anniversary of the publication “Our América,” one of Martí’s most famous essays.

According to Fidel Barbarito, Director of International Relations at Venezuela’s Ministry of Culture, the celebrations are part of a newly launched program by the ministry designed to celebrate the culture of friendly nations.

“[The new program] is a way to bring the Venezuelan people closer to the way of life lived in brotherly countries, closer to the historical processes lived by those who share geographical spaces, dreams, ideals of liberty, solidarity, fraternity,” said Barbarito.

During the first quarter of 2011, Venezuela will host weeklong celebrations of a number of countries and cultures, beginning with Caribbean nations, then Bolivia, Ecuador, Russia, Vietnam and Iran, in that order.

Marxist Theory of Art tweets!

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 10:08:00 +0000

I have opened an account with Twitter at http://twitter.com/eugenehirschf.

My first reason is to help promote this blog more widely and at the same time learn more from other people.

The second reason is that my blogging rate is pretty slow. This is partly because most of my posts are in-depth and take a fair bit of work. It’s also because I am so busy with other things that I cannot blog nearly as much as I’d like. Tweeting should help me engage more often, though more briefly.

I’m new to it, so let’s see how it goes.

The myth of Theseus and the minotaur

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 01:34:00 +0000

In the previous post, we commented upon the gentle reputation of the civilisation of Bronze Age Crete — a reputation based upon a low level of militarism, unusual freedoms for women, and relative social harmony. The Greeks, however, offer us a very different view of the Cretans in one of their most famous stories: the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Theseus killing the Minotaur. Round Attic drinking cup, c.450–440 BCE.

This is a splendid and often-repeated tale, but is more than a figment of the imagination. It illustrates how any myth is partly rooted in material and social conditions. Marx described Greek mythology as “nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination.”[1] We shall discuss mythology in general another time — for the moment, let us examine one of its great examples.

The story

Beside the many images from the myth in Greek and Roman art, we have a narrative, because it is mentioned in several ancient texts. These differ in some of the details. One of the most substantial accounts is by Plutarch in his chapter on Theseus from Parallel Lives, in which the writer even considers variations on the story. There are also references in the Roman poet Ovid’s two great works, the Metamorphoses and Heroides, and a short account in Book IV of the Library of History by Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the first century BCE.

The version I shall cite here, as the most pithy, is from the Bibliotheke (i.e. Library) attributed to Apollodorus of Athens [2]. This work, written between 100–200 CE, remains our single best source for many tales of Greek mythology.

According to legend, Minos was the son of the god Zeus and a mortal woman named Europa. He ruled a kingdom on Crete, using his powerful navy to impose Cretan rule across the Aegean and demand tribute from its peoples. The story of the Minotaur begins with the death of King Asterius, who had adopted and raised Minos.

Asterius dying childless, Minos wished to reign over Crete, but his claim was opposed. So he alleged that he had received the kingdom from the gods, and in proof of it he said that whatever he prayed for would be done. And in sacrificing to Poseidon he prayed that a bull might appear from the depths, promising to sacrifice it when it appeared. Poseidon did send him up a fine bull, and Minos obtained the kingdom, but he sent the bull to the herds and sacrificed another.[3]

Diodorus expands upon Minos’s motivation: it was his practice to regularly sacrifice a bull to Poseidon, but this bull was of such “extraordinary beauty” that he wanted it for himself.[4] Some sources (e.g. Philostratus the Elder and Propertius [5]) describe it as being white or ‘snow white’. The Bibliotheke continues:

But angry at him for not sacrificing the bull, Poseidon made the animal savage, and contrived that Pasiphae [Minos’s wife] should conceive a passion for it. In her love for the bull she found an accomplice in Daidalos, an architect, who had been banished from Athens for murder. He constructed a wooden cow on wheels, took it, hollowed it out in the inside, sewed it up in the hide of a cow which he had skinned, and set it in the meadow in which the bull used to graze. Then he introduced Pasiphae into it; and the bull came and coupled with it, as if it were a real cow. And she gave birth to Asterius, who was called the Minotaur. He had the face of a bull, but the rest of him was human; and Minos, in compliance with certain oracles, shut him up and guarded him in the Labyrinth.

Pasiphae with the minotaur. Image from a drinking cup, c. 340–320 BCE.

The Minotaur, then, was the product of a strange, to us even comical, union — Minos’s wife, aroused by Poseidon with passion for a bull, disguises herself as a cow to entice it to have sex with her. Minos’s punishment for his impiety is a half-human, half-animal son who has to be isolated from society in the labyrinth: a maze one could never escape.

The Minotaur was confined in a labyrinth, in which he who entered could not find his way out; for many a winding turn shut off the secret outward way.

Later, Androgeus, the son of Minos (and half-brother of the Minotaur), went to Athens to compete in the games, and performed so triumphantly that he was “waylaid and murdered by the jealous competitors”. In a rage, Minos, “master of the sea”, attacks Athens.

[The Athenians] inquired of the oracle how they could be delivered; and the god answered them that they should give Minos whatever satisfaction he might choose. So they sent to Minos and left it to him to claim satisfaction. And Minos ordered them to send seven youths and the same number of damsels without weapons to be fodder for the Minotaur.

This dreadful tribute had to be paid (in the accounts of Plutarch and Ovid) every nine years.

The story then introduces Theseus, the founding hero of ancient Athens. His mother Aethra conceived him of two fathers simultaneously: the mortal king Aegeus and the immortal Poseidon, making Theseus a demi-god. He was not immortal, but was capable of superlative feats. Even before setting out to fight the Minotaur, he had defeated several fearsome adversaries.

And [Theseus] was numbered among those who were to be sent as the third tribute to the Minotaur; or, as some affirm, he offered himself voluntarily...

And when he came to Crete, Ariadne, daughter of Minos, being amorously disposed to him, offered to help him if he would agree to carry her away to Athens and have her to wife. Theseus having agreed on oath to do so, she besought Daidalos to disclose the way out of the labyrinth.

And at his suggestion she gave Theseus a clue when he went in; Theseus fastened it to the door, and, drawing it after him, entered in.

The ‘clue’ is of course a ball of twine — “the famous thread” (Plutarch) — which Theseus can unravel as he goes so that he can find his way out of the labyrinth.

And having found the Minotaur in the last part of the labyrinth, he killed him by smiting him with his fists; and drawing the clue after him made his way out again. And by night he arrived with Ariadne and the children at Naxos.

There is a tragic epilogue to the story when Theseus returns home to Athens. He had agreed to raise a white sail on his ship upon his return, so that his anxiously watchful father would know he was safe. In fact he does not, and Aegeus, believing his son dead, throws himself off a cliff to drown in the sea. Ever since, that sea has borne his name: the Aegean.

Theseus became king and went on to have further adventures (see for example the Bibliotheke and Plutarch’s Theseus.) One of his less magnificent actions, according to most versions, was to abandon Ariadne, in spite of his promise to marry her, when they reached Naxos. Why he did this depends on the version one reads, and we shan’t be diverted by it here.

Unravelling the myth

How might this fabulous story, which works on several levels, be rooted in the history of the Bronze Age Aegean?

Let us begin with the Minotaur himself. Like Minos’s foster-father, his proper name was Asterius or Asterion, meaning ‘star’ or ‘starry one’. The Greek name for the Minotaur was Minotauros, derived from Minos (Μίνως) and tauros (ταύρος) or ‘bull’, i.e. the ‘bull of Minos’.

It is no accident that bull imagery should be associated with ancient Crete. As we’ve discussed, there is plenty of evidence that the bull was a significant symbol in Minoan culture, as attested by the images of bull-leaping and so forth. There are, however, no Minoan images of the Minotaur: he is a Greek creation.[6]

Although the Minotaur has his roots in Crete, he is also a more universal symbol. The Greeks’ own texts about the Minotaur do not dwell sensationally upon the gory details of the story — Apollodorus’s account is particularly spare — but the imagination is easily stirred by the concept: a half-human beast lurking within a dark and inescapable maze, hungry to devour the flesh of frightened and helpless young people. Since the first recorded story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, told us of that “terror to human beings” Humbaba, destructive and frightening creatures have stalked through our stories. Greek mythology teems with them: the Cyclops, Medusa the Gorgon, the Hydra, the Sphinx, Cerebus the three-headed dog and many more. The wicked and terrifying monster is an archetype universal to human cultures.

On another level, these creatures are identified in part with animality, symbolising the animal or savage aspect of human nature itself. The Minotaur is, in Euripides’ words, “A mingled form where two strange shapes combined, / And different natures, bull and man, were joined”, “a mingled form and hybrid birth of monstrous shape” (cited in Plutarch, my italics.) Diodorus refers to him as “this monstrous thing”. A later Roman writer, Virgil, referred to the Minotaur as the result of a “monstrous union”, the product of Pasiphae’s “unnatural love” (Aeneid, Book 6). When a heroic human being like Theseus — intelligent, brave, civilised — confronts the mythic creature, his or her victory represents our victory over the animal in ourselves.

In the myth’s terms, it is fitting that the wicked Minos who tyrannises the Aegean and demands human sacrifices should be associated with the half-animal Minotaur. The Greeks prided themselves on valuing reason over savagery, order over chaos, civilisation over barbarism. We will look at a further motivation for their making this association in a moment. But first let us look at how Theseus helps embody this contrast.

Theseus is strongly identified with Athens — he is the city’s legendary founder. By defeating various monsters he makes the region safe for civilisation. Theseus is credited with the synoikismos or ‘gathering together’, a process whereby a group of settlements combine to form a polis or city-state, and with the unification of Attica under Athenian rule. He also founded Athens’ constitution and many of its traditions. (One can read of some of his civic achievements in books 24-25 of Plutarch’s Theseus.) It is hard to imagine a greater contrast with the Minotaur, imprisoned in its dark lair awaiting human meat.

Of course, Theseus belongs to the aristocracy. This is a story of the ruling class — Aegeus, Theseus, Minos, Pasiphae, Ariadne and even the Minotaur himself. Theseus is rewarded for his victory over the Minotaur by his accession to the kingship of Athens. This may be the narrative logic behind the story’s epilogue, when Theseus’s failure to raise a white sail leads Aegeus to jump to his death — the old king must be removed so that Theseus may claim the throne on his return.

Another key symbol of the story is the labyrinth, built on Minos’s orders to house the Minotaur. As Apollodorus tells it:

Now the Minotaur was confined in a labyrinth, in which he who entered could not find his way out; for many a winding turn shut off the secret outward way [7]. The labyrinth was constructed by Daidalos... he was an excellent architect and the first inventor of images.

Daidalos (Latin: Daedalus) devised such a bewildering multitude of corridors that, according to the Roman poet Ovid, he “hardly could himself make his way out, so puzzling was the maze”.[8]

A labyrinth and a maze, though the terms are often used interchangeably, are technically not the same thing. A labyrinth is unicursal, i.e. it has a single route to the centre and back again. A maze is multicursal, i.e. it requires a person to make choices about which path they will take.

Nobody has ever discovered a labyrinth on Crete despite extensive excavations, although some scholars have made a case for a quarry near Gortyn as a possible inspiration. The only image from the Minoan period of a labyrinth is on the back of a Linear B clay tablet found at the Mycenaean site of Pylos; given that the text is about a delivery of goats, the image is unlikely to be very meaningful.

Labyrinth image from Minoan clay tablet. Photo: Marsyas.

Labyrinths appear on Cretan coins, but only from the last half-millenium BCE, long after Minoan culture had faded away. At the Egyptian site of Avaris, a Minoan wall painting has been discovered which combines four bulls with the decorative device of meanders: meanders are component parts of mazes, but this is not the same thing as an actual image of one. They seem to represent, if anything, the pattern of a tiled floor, perhaps a courtyard.

In my view, any attempt to find the ‘real’ labyrinth of the Minotaur — for example in the quarry at Gortyn — is on a wild goose chase. This doesn’t mean that there could not be some concrete precedent in Minoan culture that was suggestive to the Greek imagination.

A popular theory for the origins of this aspect of the myth is the impression made on the Mycenaeans who visited Crete by the intricate jumble of architecture in Knossos. The palace has actually been planned and constructed with great care. But with 1300 rooms connected by passages of varying sizes and many interconnecting rooms, it could have seemed (for all the exuberance of its form and decoration) like an intimidating maze to visitors.

But the labyrinth may not be so easily accounted for. The Greek word labyrinthos may derive from the pre-Greek labrys, referring to a double-headed axe which was the dominant religious symbol in Minoan civilisation. The ‘labyrinth’ would therefore be the ‘house of the double-headed axe’.

A golden Minoan labrys. Photo: Wolfgang Sauber.

The Minoans built courtyards decorated with the labrys, and some archaeologists have proposed that the bull games depicted in Minoan frescoes may at Knossos have been held in the paved central courtyard, or in the Theatral Area at the north-west. The confrontation between human and bull therefore might have a historical precedent, wrought by the mythic imagination into new form. Alternatively, ancient Greeks visiting the baffling site at Knossos may have mixed up the maze-like structure of the palace with the labrys that was so prominent there into a new conception. We don’t know.

There is a passage in Homer’s Iliad, sometimes seen as linking ceremonial dancing to a labyrinth at Knossos, which mentions

a dancing floor as well...
like that one in royal Knossos
Daidalos made for the Princess Ariadne.
Here young men and the most desired young girls
were dancing...
in lines
as though in ranks, they moved on one another.[9]

The Greek traveller Pausanius later describes “Ariadne’s Dance, mentioned by Homer in the Iliad, carved in relief on white stone.”[10] But this is weak evidence for a supposed labyrinth, even weaker for being conveyed through imaginative poetry centuries after the Minoans danced no more.

Several of the ancient accounts refer to something explicitly called, or very closely resembling, a maze. We have cited above Apollodorus and Ovid; Diodorus refers to a labyrinth “the passage-ways of which were so winding that those unfamiliar with them had difficulty in making their way out”. Whatever its obscure origins, the image of the Minotaur trapped in a confusing maze was well established among the ancient Greeks by the time the surviving accounts were written.

The lair of the Minotaur may have been as much a spiritual one — a dark and confusing place of the mind — as a physical construction. The ‘palaces’ of the Minoans were built to a different, more organic scheme to the orderly architecture of classical Greece, and may in the myth have functioned as a symbol of unreason, an appropriate companion to the half-animal Minotaur and the barbaric Minos. For this reason it is not hard to see why a labyrinth in the strict (i.e. unicursal) sense is less powerful as an image than a maze which one could never escape except by one’s own ingenuity and heroism.

Minoan Crete vs Mycenaean Greece

Daidalos (“cunning worker”), who receives his earliest recorded mention in Homer’s Iliad in the extract cited above, was, like Theseus, an Athenian. This might not be accidental. One of the symbolic oppositions suggested by the story is that of Cretans as animal and tyrannical, and of Athenians as civilised and rational. It is true that Daidalos was no moral paragon: he had fled Greece after murdering his talented young apprentice Talos in a fit of envy, and his career sometimes serves as a caution against the possible dangers of technology. But Daidalos was a craftsman renowned for his ingenuity. He helps Ariadne by supplying her with the thread that will save her beloved Theseus. He thereby stands up to the will of the tyrant Minos, and affirms the power of reason (the simple but ingenious solution to the problem of escaping the labyrinth) against chaos (the confusing maze with its flesh-eating half-beast). Minos persecutes and pursues Daidalos when he hears of his part in Theseus’s feat, but that is another story.[11]

Minos himself appears only in myth. Apart from a couple of ambiguous inscriptions in Linear A, we have no historical evidence of his existence. There may have been a historical individual who inspired his mythological namesake, or ‘Minos’ may have been a Cretan word for ‘king’ rather like the Egyptian ‘Pharaoh’, or he may be pure invention. There is a curious continuity in Minos’s story: he was himself fathered by a bull, in a sense, as this was the form taken by Zeus when he abducted Europa. Yet this act of lechery was typical of Zeus and must be understood differently to the curse of Poseidon.

In mythology Minos seems to play a dual role. On the one hand we have a constructive ruler who establishes a Cretan constitution and enjoys “familiar converse with great Zeus” [12]; on the other hand, a cruel figure described by the Greek geographer Strabo as “tyrannical, harsh, and an exactor of tribute”. This contradiction was noted by Plutarch:

For Minos was always abused and reviled in the Attic theatres, and it did not avail him either that Hesiod called him “most royal,” or that Homer styled him “a confidant of Zeus,” but the tragic poets prevailed, and from platform and stage showered obloquy down upon him, as a man of cruelty and violence. And yet they say that Minos was a king and lawgiver, and that Rhadamanthus was a judge under him, and a guardian of the principles of justice defined by him.

One response to this has been to see the mythological figure as two different kings, the first beneficent and civilised, the second tyrannical. Whatever one’s view on that question, it is a less than admirable Minos who appears in the Minotaur story. Minos rashly attempts to trick the gods by keeping the finest bull for himself, the sort of arrogance (or hubris) the Greeks strongly disapproved of; he is punished by the unnatural union of his wife with a bull and cursed with a half-animal son; and he attacks Athens and demands an appalling tribute in the form of seven youths and seven maidens, all virgins, who every year (or nine years, depending upon the version) are to be sent to the Minotaur to be eaten alive.

These acts of cannibalism by the Minotaur — who is, after all, half-human — are a potent symbol of ‘bestiality’ in the myth. Cannibalism was as much a taboo for the ancient Greeks as it is for us. There are plenty of illustrations in Greek myth of it being rejected or punished: for example, when Tantalus serves up his own son Pelops in a stew for the gods, the gods refuse to eat. When the father of the Olympians, Kronos, eats his children to prevent them challenging him for power, he is punished when Zeus is carried away to safety and later returns to overthrow him. Accusing someone of cannibalism was as effective a way to demonise them as it would be today.

Why would the Greeks seek to demonise the Cretans?

The story seems to refer back to the period when Crete was the pre-eminent civilisation in the Aegean, a period in which Greek cities — including Athens, which in around 1500 BCE was a Mycenaean settlement — lived in its shadow and perhaps even had to pay the Minoans tribute.

In his Histories Herodotus mentions the Carians, who occupied the Greek islands and were subjects of Minos, and says they paid no tribute. This was perhaps because they ‘filled his ships’ on demand: but Herodotus’ statement implies that other peoples did have to pay tribute, and he goes on, ‘Minos had subjected much land and was of good fortune in war’.[13] He and Thucydides both credit the Minoans with naval dominance of the Aegean, contributing to theories of a Minoan thalassocracy, or sea empire, in the region.

Whether Athens paid tribute to the Minoans of any sort, let alone in the form of human sacrifices, we can’t say. Modern archaeology has not discovered evidence that the Minoans attempted to dominate anyone, even where they had settled overseas. Minoan artifacts across the Aegean imply some level of cultural distribution, but this is not the same as political or military domination. The relative defencelessness of the towns on Crete itself implies an internal peace that is at odds with the incessant strife of the later Greek states, and with the walled citadels of the Mycenaeans.

The story, however, suggests a polarisation between a harsh Cretan power and a heroic civilised Athens. The equation of Crete with tyranny, animality and even cannibalism therefore acts as propaganda against a hegemonic foe — perhaps the second, oppressive version of Minos. Theseus’ defeat of the Minotaur, like Herakles’ subduing of the Cretan Bull and Theseus’s later killing of that animal, may be a symbol of the shift of power from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece. It may also represent the overthrow of an archaic religious order with a new one. Theseus would then characterise not an individual so much as an episode of history.

We should take care not to equate the fledgling Athens contemporaneous with Bronze Age Crete with the Athens that achieved hegemony over the Greek world about a thousand years after Minoan civilisation was snuffed out. But we do not look to myths for historical accuracy. The story may be a dim reflection of a historical context, obscured by the intervening ‘Dark Ages’ and converted into a heroic narrative by the oral tradition. We may speculate about whether Theseus or Minos represent actual leaders, etc, but the story’s interest for us lies in how it characterises the two civilisations and what meaning this had for the Greeks.

Conclusion

The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur has been taken up by subsequent artists and reshaped for their own purposes. The Minotaur appears briefly in Dante’s Inferno, both Blake and Picasso made drawings of him, and the surrealist movement named a journal after him — to name just a handful of examples.

This is perhaps because the myth works on many levels. Most immediately it is a stirring tale. It also explores some profound psychological questions, and embodies such oppositions as reason and unreason, civilisation and barbarism, which fascinated the Greeks. It is also a political story, a form of propaganda that presents the Greeks as heroic, the decaying Cretan power as deserving overthrow. As such, it tells us more about the Greeks than about the Minoans.

It is important for us not to oversimplify, for reasons of space, the complexity of the story. The myth of the Minotaur is not a simplistic account of a muscular hero defeating an evil monster, but part of a narrative continuum. Theseus and the Minotaur are partly both products of deeds that predate them and over which they have no control. It is how Theseus responds to the situation he finds himself in which determines his heroism. The characters are complex and sometimes contradictory. Daidalos devises the clever ruse of the thread, but he also built the labyrinth in the first place; Minos does not follow acceptable Greek practice by killing his cursed son by exposure, albeit keeping him in degraded conditions; the paragon Theseus (for whatever reason) does not honour his promise to Ariadne and later kidnaps another woman, Helen of Troy.

Being a myth, the story is of course elusive. There is no ‘correct answer’ to what it is all about, and there are other possible readings not explored here. This is the ambiguity of symbolic representations, which are not necessarily directed rooted in any concrete thing.

Anybody approaching this myth will, as Rodney Castleden commented, “inevitably be diverted and distracted to some extent by archaic images rising up from the mythic Knossos, the exotic city round which the Greeks wove fantastic legends.”[14] As well as this, and the limits of the archaeological evidence available, consider the timespans involved: arising in an oral tradition, the story was already centuries old when writers like Apollodorus or Plutarch recorded it. Even if there really was a King Minos, who lived at the peak of Minoan civilisation — say around 1600 BCE — he would have been dead roughly 800 years before even Homer’s work was first written down. The existence of different versions of the myth emphasises the elusive nature of imaginative narratives whose contact with archaeological fact is confusing and partial at best.

Trying to find concrete historical precedents for mythology always involves a great deal of speculation. Nonetheless, the scientific background to this story gives us fascinating insights into its possible origins and meaning. As two Aegean specialists put it:

The old legends, in short, may not have been nostalgic fantasies of a lost golden age spun out of whole cloth, but rather seemed to be dim memories of a very real, rich and vibrant civilisation...[15]

The story of Theseus and the Minotaur illustrates how mythology, for all its psychology and fancy, does not spring mysteriously from the imagination, but is a product of particular social and material conditions, even if the connection has become very obscure. And it shows that even a fairy tale has an ideological spin.

Further investigation
Apollodorus: Bibliotheke
Plutarch: ‘Theseus’ from Parallel Lives
The Theoi Project on the Minotaur, Ariadne and the Cretan Bull

[1] Marx, Introduction to the Grundrisse (1857–61).
[2] As it cites writers who lived after Apollodorus, the Bibliotheke cannot have been written by him. For this reason the writer is sometimes referred to as ‘Pseudo-Apollodorus’. The book survives in three books, plus an by J. G. Frazer which summarises the lost part.
[3] Apollodorus, 3.1.3. From the translation by James George Frazer. The story continues in sections 3.15.7–3.16.2 and in the ‘Epitome’ 1.7–1.10. I have regularised the spelling of ‘Daedalus’ as ‘Daidalos’ for consistency with the rest of my article.
[4] Diodorus Siculus, Book 4, 77.2 of Library of History (1st century BCE). In the 40th of his Fabulae, Pseudo-Hyginus writes that the curse was laid on Pasiphae by Venus for failing for several years to make offerings to her.
[5] Respectively, Philostratus the Elder, Book 1 section 16 of Imagines, and Propertius, Book 2 poem 32 of the Elegies.
[6] The Cretan Bull features in another story of the ancient Greeks, the seventh labour of Herakles (Hercules). After it impregnates Pasiphae, the bull continues to rampage around the island, and Herakles was bidden to wrestle and capture it. It is later finally despatched by Theseus in one of his first adventures before he sails to confront the Minotaur.
[7] Apollodorus, 3.1.4. This phrase seems itself to be a quotation by Apollodorus from an unknown source.
[8] Ovid, Book 8 of Metamorphoses.
[9] Homer, Book 18 of The Iliad. I have cited the translation by Robert Fitzgerald.
[10] Pausanius, 9.40.3 of Description of Greece (2nd century CE).
[11] Which is also recounted by Apollodorus, introducing on the way the equally famous story of Daidalos’s son Icarus and his wings of wax. One can read about Daidalos and his career at the Perseus Digital Library.
[12] Homer, Book 19, line 178 of The Odyssey.
[13] Herodotus, 1.171 of Histories.
[14] Rodney Castleden, The Knossos Labyrinth (1990). We often see ancient Crete through a prism of Greek myth and legend.
[15] Donald Preziosi and Louise A. Hitchcock, Aegean Art and Architecture (1999).

Grace in the Aegean: The art of the Minoans

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 16:26:00 +0000

Out in the wine-dark sea there is a rich and lovely island called Crete.
— Homer, Book XIX of The Odyssey

Archaeologists believe the first settlers landed on Crete in about 7000 BCE, and recent DNA research suggests they probably came from Anatolia in Asia Minor. We do not know what they called themselves, and the existence of their archaeological remains was not even suspected until the late nineteenth century. Yet between 2700 to 1450 BCE, Crete was the centre of one of the Bronze Age’s most vivacious civilisations [1]. The British archaeologist Arthur Evans [2] called their culture ‘Minoan’, after the King Minos famed in the myths of a later culture, the Greeks.

The Aegean Sea in the Bronze Age.
Map by Eugene Hirschfeld.

Lying near the coasts of Southern Europe, Africa and Asia Minor, Crete was influenced by cultural developments in the key centres of civilisation. Minoan civilisation was roughly contemporary with the Old and Middle Kingdoms in Egypt, the Sumerian Ur III dynasty in Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley civilisations based around Harappa and Mohendro-Daro. Many miles away, the ancient Britons were completing Stonehenge (c.1500 BCE).

The heyday of classical Athens was still a thousand years in the future. Although civilisation had existed in the Middle East since around 4500 BCE, and a culture had appeared on the Cycladic islands to the north centuries in advance of the Minoans, there was no culture of comparable importance elsewhere in Europe until the emergence of the Greek people usually referred to as Mycenaeans — famous for supposedly fighting the Trojan War — in the same region around 1600 BCE.

Background

With its small rivers and rocky hills, Crete doesn’t offer the easiest terrain for an agricultural society. But there was enough fertile ground for the Minoans to grow cereals, vines and olives. Although the island today is barren because of centuries of deforestation, in ancient times cypresses were abundant.

The sea served as a natural barrier against invasion and also as an opportunity to make money. Crete was well placed in relation to sea trading routes. The Greek historian Thucydides claimed that Minos was the first to build a navy:

And the first person known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent the first colonies... and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the revenues for his own use.[3]

With their merchant fleet, the Minoans came to dominate the Aegean, sailing for hundreds of miles in search of trade, from Spain in the west to Syria in the east. Goods flowed from Cretan harbours including wine, olive oil, tin, pottery, bronze artifacts and metalware. In exchange the Minoans received gold, silver, ivory, lapis lazuli and obsidian from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and across the Mediterranean world.[4]

Town with boats in the harbour. Minoan fresco image from Akrotiri on the Greek island of Thera (now Santorini), c. 1600 BCE.

Minoan colonies and trading posts were set up in the Cyclades islands due north of Crete — including Santorini, home of the famous site of Akrotiri — as well as mainland Greece and Asia Minor. It is possibly a measure of both the Minoans’ geographical isolation and the strength of their fleet that their coastal towns seem to have had few fortifications. Thus their period of ascendancy was called by Arthur Evans the Pax Minoica or ‘Minoan peace’ — a time when cities needed no walls. Like Gibbon’s Pax Romana, of course, such a peace if it existed would have been the product of military strength rather than pacifism — the Minoans did make weapons, and archaeologists have found watchtowers and fortifications on the island. But there is little evidence of warfare at home or overseas.

Historians generally speak of a formative period of Minoan culture from about 3000–1900 BCE, when Crete appears to have been divided into local regions. This was succeeded by a new system where power was centralised around a monarch, a period characterised by the building of grand palace complexes at Knossos, Phaistos, Mallia, Zakros, and other towns. These palaces, which had no fortifications, acted as the centres of commercial, cultural and social life. Historian Rodney Castleden summarised this civilisation as “very advanced in its orderly and bureaucratic organisation, showing a strongly rational and practical side with highly developed craft technologies, and yet it also possessed all the imaginative power and childlike freshness of a very young culture.”[5]

The so-called ‘palaces’ were the base upon which Minoan civilisation was built. Their significance was such that they influenced the naming of historical periods — whereas Evans created a chronology based upon Early, Middle and Late periods, an alternative system defines the early Bronze Age period as ‘Pre-Palatial’, the next the ‘Proto-Palatial’ or ‘Old Palace’ period, and the time of the rebuilt palaces the ‘Neo-Palatial’ or ‘New Palace’period. The old palaces were destroyed in around 1700 BCE: a natural disaster such as earthquakes is the most likely cause, as Crete’s main rivals at that time were not seafaring powers. Yet the palaces were quickly rebuilt, on a grander scale. In about 1450 BCE there was another wave of destruction of palaces and villas, from which the civilisation never recovered.

Minoan art

Minoan art is quite distinct from that of pre-Hellenic Greece. The surviving work, much of it in the museum at Heraklion near Knossos, covers a range of types, including fresco, pottery, jewellery, engraved seals and figurines. We have relatively little art from the Pre-Palatial period, the best work coming from the civilisation’s peak around 2000-1450 BCE.

The Minoans are famous for producing some of the most beautiful pottery of the ancient world, which finely demonstrates their rich decorative imagination. Minoan pottery has been found all around the Aegean and Mediterranean, including Cyprus, Syria and Egypt.

Minoan ceramic in the marine style. Photo: Andree Stephan.

The best known style is the Kamares Ware [6], a fine pottery decorated in reds, browns and whites with symmetrical patterns or stylised images of sea or plant life.

The designs show an admirable harmony between the painted forms and the form of the vessel. As time went by, the Minoans began to observe nature more closely, moving from linear patterns to birds, fish and flowers. Later in the island’s history arose the ‘marine’ style in which the ceramics were covered in sea creatures — this dates to after a volcanic eruption that probably caused destructive tidal waves and a new relationship to the sea, which we will look at in a moment.

Minoan metalworkers too were renowned, not least in their skill with bronze, the defining metal of the age. Minoan decorated swords were the finest in the Aegean. They produced fine jewellery — see for example the Aigina treasure, believed by some researchers to be the work of Minoan craftspeople.

Bee pendant from the site of Mallia, demonstrating a command of the granulation and filigree techniques.

But some of the best-known works of Minoan art are fresco paintings. Fresco is the painting of plastered walls, usually found in palaces and villas. The artist would have prepared the wall with a layer of white plaster, then engraved the main elements of the composition onto the wall, adding the paint while the plaster was still wet. This differed from the dry technique of the Egyptians, demanding swift, fluid execution and spontaneity.

As a maritime trading civilisation, it is unsurprising that the Minoans left us some beautiful fresco images of their ships, wooden sailing vessels superior to any others on the Mediterranean. Perhaps because of this fleet and the protecting seas, military images are unusual in Minoan art. Until the attacks by the Mycenaeans in 1450 BCE, there is no real evidence that the Minoans fought wars with other any culture. This is in stark contrast to their contemporaries: the city states of Mesopotamia were constantly at war, celebrating their exploits on such works as the Stele of the Vultures, and Egypt covered tomb walls with images of military pomp.

The Minoans preferred leisurely scenes or sports. They loved to decorate walls with murals of dolphins, flowers and fish. Their art has a grace, movement and exuberance distinct from the art of Egypt and Sumer, and they enjoy decorative motifs, sinuous shapes and strong and sometimes improbable colours, as in the beautiful image of blue monkeys from Akrotiri. Their craftsmanship is second to none and delights in the beauty of natural things.

The Blue Monkey fresco, Akrotiri.

The Minoans were skilled and sensitive architects, and the palaces count amongst their greatest works of art. The most famous is the palace at Knossos, often called the ‘Palace of Minos’, built facing the Aegean about five miles inland. A multi-storey complex of corridors, rooms and staircases built around a central courtyard, the palace boasted impressive plumbing as well as lovely frescos, columns and gardens. Visitors found its ‘agglutinative’[7] architecture of over 1000 rooms so confusing that it is thought to have inspired the myth of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Knossos was an entire community, a centre for religion, pottery production and storage of trade goods, and a venue for festivals; there are workrooms, identifiable by the items left behind, for craftworkers such as potters and metalworkers. For this reason the term ‘palace’ is not adequate for describing these Minoan complexes. Of course, such structures are not static, and the site evolved over several millennia, starting in the Neolithic and ending probably about 1380 BCE when it was used by the Mycenaeans.

Sitting at the apex of a trading empire, the Cretan kings were extremely wealthy. It is therefore interesting that they appear to have ordered no sculpture, memorials, king-lists or other works to boast of their power and status. Knossos has been described as the primus inter pares (first among equals) among the Minoan palaces: yet even there we find nothing like the mighty monuments to the god-kings of Egypt. We have no record either of a king Minos or of any other named monarch, male or female. One conjecture is that Minoan monarchs were, in the Anatolian tradition, ‘priest-kings’ who combined royal with religious authority. The sacred double-headed axe appears all over the Knossos palace and there are numerous small shrines, as well as the so-called Throne Room which was probably used for religious purposes. But this can’t necessarily hold true for all Crete. Historian R. F. Willetts has suggested that the apparent modesty of the Minoan aristocracy can be explained by a difference in religious emphasis: the Minoans did not seek to associate the king with the immortal gods, like the Egyptians or Mesopotamians, but rather worshipped a particular vision of nature. From this standpoint, images glorifying the king were unnecessary. But this leaves unresolved the question of a class emphasis.

One of the most pervasive symbols in Cretan art is the bull. We can trace this cult back to Anatolia — the bull imagery and remains used in shrines in Çatalhöyük may be the ancestors of Minoan religion. In Bronze Age Crete there are frescos of bulls; drinking vessels in the shape of bulls’ heads; bulls’ horns carved from stone. The Hagia Triada sarcophagus portrays bull sacrifice. Murals and sculptures depict the ritual sport of bull-jumping, where an athlete would somersault over a bull’s back while another held its horns. It is not certain whether this remarkable feat was actually practiced, but it appears in other cultures too, and the ubiquity of the image suggests some sort of confrontation between human and bull must have taken place. The bull was a religious symbol, and bull-leaping may have had some ritual purpose rather than mere acrobatics, perhaps linking virility and divine power. In the Grand Fresco at Knossos, crowds of people are seen around a three-part building, probably a shrine, decorated with bulls’ horns. Strikingly, women are shown participating in bull-leaping as well as men.

Arthur Evans and the remaking of Minoan culture

In discussing Minoan art we must bear in mind that many of the extant images and artifacts, such as the so-called ‘Prince of the Lilies’, are not the original works. Many are in fact reconstructions by artists connected to Arthur Evans. When we examine the frescos we notice that the remaining fragments of the original account for just a few square inches of the whole, and some images use fragments that did not even necessarily belong together. On visiting the museum at Heraklion in the 1920s, Evelyn Waugh found the works discordantly modern. “It is impossible to disregard the suspicion,” he wrote, “that their painters have tempered their zeal for accurate reconstruction with a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue.”[8]

The palace at Knossos was partly rebuilt by Evans. Visitors to the site may wander between columns and through multiple stories, but very little of this is original. The painted columns visible today, whose originals were made of wood, are made of twentieth-century concrete. Evans’ reconstruction work gave Knossos, as Cathy Gere remarked, “the dubious distinction of being one of the first reinforced concrete buildings ever erected on the island”[9].

Evans sometimes seems to have allowed his vision of Minoan culture — charming, goddess-worshipping, a kind of peaceful Eden compared to a rough mainland — to intervene between him and the evidence, and his restorations are plagued by dubious archaeology and sometimes downright forgery. While we may condemn him for interfering with the archaeological record, it was not so unusual by the standards of the time. And if the art of Knossos has been compromised, that of the Akrotiri site on Thera/Santorini is indisputably original.

Writing

Evans’ excavations turned up a number of clay tablets written upon in an unknown alphabet. It is very likely that writing arose in Minoan culture for the same reason it did in Sumer: to keep accounts. An early pictographic script, perhaps inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, was replaced in around 1700 BCE by one which represented sounds, i.e. a true alphabet, known as Linear A.

Clay tablet from Knossos with Linear A script.

Linear A was engraved onto wet clay tablets, much like writing in Mesopotamia. It has still not been deciphered, as it is unlike any other and there is a lack of contextual evidence. If there is imaginative literature among these writings, we cannot read it. We have no Minoan poetry, no songs, no history, no scripture. It is a great culture, but a silent one.

By around 1450 BCE, Linear A had been replaced by Linear B, which on Crete is found only at Knossos, and was adapted from the Greek of the Mycenaeans who by then controlled the island. Linear B has been deciphered, but the surviving documents are mostly records of tax and goods and tell us frustratingly little about the island’s history and literature.

One of archaeology’s more mysterious objects is the Phaistos Disc, excavated from the Minoan palace at Phaistos. A fired clay disc about six inches across, it is covered on both sides with spirals of stamped symbols. Although the symbols are generally assumed to be a script, they belong to none of the three writing systems mentioned above. They have never been deciphered. Because the symbols seem to have been impressed into the clay using 45 stamps, the disc was described by Jared Diamond as “by far the earliest printed document in the world”[10]. Such sophisticated requirements imply that the disc, whether Minoan or from some other culture, was no one-off.

Women and Minoan art

Women seem to have enjoyed higher status in Minoan culture than was usual in the Bronze Age. We have already made mention of Minoan women in our article on women in ancient art. Women served as administrators and priestesses as well as participating in the dangerous and athletic sport of bull-leaping. (Even if no one in Crete ever actually leaped over a bull, the presence of women as well as men in the imagery, e.g. the ‘Toreador Fresco’, is itself revealing.) Some archaeologists argue in addition that Crete was matrilineal, i.e. one’s descent was measured through the mother, not the father [11].

Women always play a massive role in any economy, whether or not it is acknowledged, and ancient Crete was no exception. A fresco in Akrotiri known as ‘The Saffron Gatherers’ shows us women collecting saffron, a high-value resource used as a dye to indicate wealth and status in the wearer.

Detail from ‘The Saffron Gatherers’, c.1500 BCE.

Women’s relative equality may be because of the absence of military threat, giving far less impetus to the development of a male warrior discourse and thus a greater role and respect for women. It is tempting when looking at images of young women somersaulting over bulls with the men to conclude that women enjoyed considerable freedom. The so-called ‘Grandstand’ fresco at Knossos shows a crowd of both men and women attending a festival — the biggest figures are all female, well-dressed, animated and enjoying themselves.

As for religion, Minoan art provides us with figurines of a ‘snake goddess’[12], and frescos such as on the sarcophagus at Hagia Triada on which women priests outnumber men. No images of male deities have been found from the peak of Minoan civilisation. The apparent prominence of women in Minoan religion has led to conjecture that the principal deity or deities of Minoan Crete may have been female, e.g. an earth or mother goddess. Through animal sacrifices, the Minoans appealed to the goddess to avert the familiar Bronze Age tragedies of failed crops, disease, shipwreck, and so on. The prevalence of women in such imagery has led to conjecture about Minoan religion being in some way the worship of women, even that ancient Crete was a ‘matriarchal’ culture based upon the status of the Goddess. But the prominence of a female goddess, if this is how the figurines may be interpreted, does not allow us to conclude anything of the sort, any more than the absence of old people in the frescos means that Minoans never grew old.

The reality is that we don’t know what is going on in the Grand Fresco, or who the snake-carrying women are, or what sexual relations were in Crete. There are no records of kings, and there are no records of queens either. What we see depicted in art does not necessarily correlate to actual roles or relationships in society, so to extend what we know to a general pre-eminence of women is untenable. We may tentatively conjecture that women pre-dominated in the religious sphere of Minoan life, and no more.

The problem of Minoan art

Cretan class society included a ruling class of nobles and priests, a middle-ranking class of artisans, officials, etc, a mass of primary producers, mostly farmers and labourers, and a bottom layer of slaves. Its social structure therefore resembles that of other cultures of the era. Yet the art of the Minoans is sometimes regarded as an enigmatic puzzle. Arnold Hauser commented that it “presents the sociologist with the most difficult problem in the whole field of ancient-oriental art.”

In all this vast period in which the abstract geometrical style predominated, in this unchanging world of strict traditionalism and rigid forms, Crete presents us with a picture of colourful, unrestrained, exuberant life, although economic and social conditions are no different here than anywhere else in the surrounding world. Here too despots and feudal landlords are in power [13], here too the whole culture is under the aegis of an aristocratic social order, exactly as in Egypt and Mesopotamia — and yet what a difference in the whole conception of art![14]

Every ancient economy was built above all upon agriculture. The great majority of Minoans laboured on land owned by a small minority of landowning aristocrats: where the latter enjoyed latifundia and fine villas, most Cretans lived in small mud-brick houses. As such, Crete was no different to the other early civilisations to the east.

Our response to this contrast between the Minoans and elsewhere must begin by pointing out that the art was not as radically different as all that. The range of cultural artifacts — pottery, wall paintings, figurines, tablets — is of course basically the same. Although Minoan designs have a lighter touch than the Egytian, we know that the two civilisations were in contact. In a tomb in Thebes dating to about 1500 BCE, foreigners described as ‘chiefs of the Keftiu and the isles in the midst of the sea’ are depicted bringing gifts to the Pharaoh Tutmosis III. Unlike the Egyptians they wear long hair and kilts and carry distinctive Minoan-style ‘oxhide’ ingots. These people, believed to be Minoans, were respected by the Egyptians — who were often dismissive of foreigners — for their skills in seafaring and trade. We can see a possible debt to the Egyptians in similarities in Minoan wall decorations: they show people from the side, never frontally; like the Egyptians they paint men and women in different colours (red and white respectively); they draw humans in a more stylised way than animals; they ignore perspective; and so on. The Egyptian influence should not surprise us, as its culture was widely admired in the ancient world.

There are other similarities too. Though Egyptian figures are certainly more rigid, their animal and plant images can be just as lively and colourful as the Minoans’, as the images from the tomb of Nebamun beautifully illustrate.

Nonetheless Minoan art does show a greater emphasis on spontaneity and invention, and is more secular and informal. It is less constrained by rigid conventions and geometry, and undoubtedly has, like any culture, a distinctive character of its own. The absence of battles, kings, boastful inscriptions and historical events in its art is surprising for the time. We need to recognise such distinctions without falling into the crude formulations sometimes used in the past, such as posing cultured Minoans against barbarous Mycenaeans.

Hauser’s first explanation for the particular character of the Minoans’ art is the relatively modest role of religion in their society. Minoan shrines seem to have been small, even in the palaces, kept in people’s homes or built in out of the way places like hills and caves. There is nothing like the great cult of the dead seen in Egypt, or the grandiose works that went with it. There was therefore less impetus towards sternly imposed conventions.

He also admires the urbanity of the cultural life that arose around the palaces:

The freedom of Cretan art can also be partly explained by the extraordinarily important role which city life and commerce played in the island’s economy... city life was probably nowhere so highly developed as in Crete.

Minoan urban centres were small compared to some of the imperial capitals to the east, but this should not be surprising given the much bigger territories of those cultures, and according to one historian the Aegean urban communities were “comparable in scale and almost certainly complexity, to many of their Eastern contemporaries.”[15] In this urban context, art was still principally created for the ruling aristocracy, yet there was a little more room for spontaneity and elegance, especially when religious convention was less strict. And he concludes with an observation on the character of the Cretan ruling class:

The special character of Cretan art must be seen first of all in relation to the fact that, in the Aegean, in contrast to other areas, trade, above all foreign trade, was concentrated in the hands of the ruling class. The unstable spirit of the trader, fond of making innovations, was able to make its way less hampered than in Egypt or Babylonia.

Willetts offers a different perspective. Noting that there is evidence of collective social organisation in the earlier phases of Minoan culture, he observes that the palace complexes represented a comparatively closely-knit and collective society and would have supported many specialists from their stored surplus. He comments:

Elsewhere, in the older centres of Bronze Age civilisation, this kind of dependence on the specialists seems to have resulted in a marked loss of freedom and prestige... The increasing diversity of specialist production under the economic and commercial stimulus of the Minoan palace centres may well, on the contrary, have resulted rather in an extension of such freedom and social prestige. The tenacious collective traditions of the past still appear to have exercised an enormous influence in the flourishing high period of palatial Crete.[16]

The ‘palace’ was the centre of Minoan life: of trade and agriculture, but also of art. It was perhaps this union of trade and culture, in a context of long internal stability, that gave Minoan art its urbane liveliness.

Crete’s geopolitical situation may also have exerted an influence. With the natural protection of the sea and backed by their fleet, the Minoans had little need to fear invasion. In the absence of a warrior class, not only were women’s rights better than in most Bronze Age cultures, but art was less constrained by the military and religion.

The Thera eruption

How the Minoan civilisation came to an end is an ongoing debate in archaeology. The most plausible theory relates not to economics or geopolitics but to a natural disaster.

The Aegean area is geologically unstable: it sits upon the meeting of two great tectonic plates, the Eurasiatic and African, causing both earthquakes and volcanic activity. Sometime between 1650-1600 BCE (the date is disputed), the island of Thera, eighty miles to the north of Crete, was hit by one of the ancient world’s mightiest volcanic eruptions. Evidence for this catastrophe can be found as far away as China and Ireland. The consequences for Crete would have been disastrous: a great wave would have hit its cities and shattered its navy, and hot ash would have blighted its crops. (The partial sinking of Thera may have given rise to the myth of Atlantis, which we will explore in another post.) The only reason the remarkable site of Akrotiri survived is that it was buried under ten metres of ash and pumice, like an Aegean Pompeii.

Despite this cataclysm, Minoan culture did not simply stop after 1600 BCE. But their view of the world must have been profoundly affected. After the Thera eruption and tidal wave, sea creatures proliferate on Minoan pottery, implying a new relationship to the sea. Archaeologist Colin MacDonald has suggested that decline was exacerbated by social breakdown, the authority of Minoan monarchs and religious leaders dashed by their powerlessness to prevent the disaster. Thus the Minoans had already been weakened in multiple ways when they were confronted by the external threat of the Mycenaeans. Evidence of intrusion from the mainland around 1450 BCE can be seen in new styles in pottery and in palace and tomb architecture. When the Knossos palace was finally destroyed in the mid-14th century BCE, it was not rebuilt.

The ‘eruption’ theory still leaves us with a puzzle: why would the eruption bring the Minoans to their knees, but leave the Mycenaeans, also an Aegean people, perfectly capable of organising and executing an invasion?

Conclusion

It seems likely that a series of blows struck by natural forces and invasion were to blame for the decline of Minoan civilisation. By about 1400 BCE, the Minoans had been displaced by the reputedly more warlike Mycenaeans as the dominant culture in the Aegean. Tablets from Knossos were now written in Linear B, a script used for Mycenaean Greek, and art moved to a more geometric style. Whatever the precise turn of events that caused their decline, the Minoans’ material civilisation disappeared almost completely. They make hardly any appearance in the histories of the ancient Greeks. For over thirty centuries their civilisation survived only in myth until the Cretan archaeologist Minos Kalokairinos initiated excavations in 1878, followed by Arthur Evans in March 1900.

Nonetheless the Minoans’ influence outlived them. The Minoans were not Greeks, but they can count the ancient Greeks among their cultural descendants. The art, architecture and religion of early mainland Greece show a Minoan influence. From the Minoans, the Mycenaeans learned to make bronze and finely-crafted artifacts, and adapted their own script from Linear A. The debt is even symbolically represented in myth: it is on Crete that Zeus spent his childhood. As a baby he was carried off to protect him from the infanticide of his father Kronos, and was hidden in a cave on Mount Ida until he was ready to take over as the ruling deity of the Greek world.

The excavation of Minoan Crete had the stunning effect of extending European civilisation back into antiquity — partly contemporaneous, even, with that of Egypt. But although Minoan Crete was the first major civilisation to appear in Europe, I would argue that to stress Crete as the first ‘European’ civilisation is to misread the geopolitics of the ancient world. It should rather be seen as the westernmost expression of a development lasting thousands of years that began in, and spread from, Mesopotamia and Egypt, which also includes Syria, the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean. This region is connected by geography and trade, but also by cultural transmission. Crete is, as Michael Wood put it, the “stepping-stone between Europe, Asia Minor and Africa”.

Further investigation

Learn about the Akrotiri site from the Thera Foundation: http://www.therafoundation.org/akrotiri/
See a gallery of images from Akrotiri on Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri
Watch the BBC’s 2001 documentary Ancient Apocalypse: The Minoans on YouTube (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
Explore the Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean.

[1] Along with the Cycladic culture and the Mycenaeans, the Minoans represent one of the three main Bronze Age cultures of the Aegean.
[2] After becoming fascinated by Minoan clay tablets, Evans initiated excavations on Crete, uncovering Knossos in 1900 (although he was not the first to dig there).
[3] Thucydides, First Book, History of the Peloponnesian War (431 BCE).
[4] We should never under-estimate how ‘joined up’ the ancient world was. See for example the late Bronze Age shipwreck discovered near Uluburun in Turkey, which was carrying a remarkable assortment of international goods from northern Europe, Africa and Mesopotamia.
[5] Rodney Castleden, Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete (1990).
[6] ‘Ware’ is a term used by archaeologists to refer to ceramic styles.
[7] The choice adjective comes from R. F. Willetts, The Civilisation of Ancient Crete (2004).
[8] From Labels (1930). Cited in Mary Beard, ‘Knossos — Fakes, facts and mystery’ (2009).
[9] Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (2009). For a riposte to Gere’s book, see Nanno Marinatos’ book review in American Journal of Archaeology (April 2010).
[10] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (1998).
[11] As we’ve pointed out before, this should not be confused with ‘matriarchy’ or rule by the mother, itself a concept that is often mistaken to mean general ‘rule by women’.
[12] Bear in mind that these have also been partially ‘restored’ by Evans’ team.
[13] Incidentally, Hauser’s use of the term ‘feudal’ here, like his references elsewhere in his book to an ancient ‘bourgeoisie’, is completely inappropriate. Both terms belong to different modes of production that would not emerge until centuries later.
[14] Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol 1 (1951).
[15] Todd Whitelaw, ‘From sites to communities: defining the human dimensions of Minoan urbanism’ in ed. Keith Branigan, Urbanism in the Aegean Bronze Age (2001).
[16] R. F. Willetts, op. cit.

The meme delusion

noreply@blogger.com (Eugene Hirschfeld) — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 23:12:00 +0000

We have argued for a model of cultural evolution based upon humans’ material engagement with the world. There is another, currently fashionable, theory of cultural transmission we need to consider: the meme.

This theory was introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, and has since won support from other writers including Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore. The concept is simple enough: to explain cultural development, apply the process of natural selection. As it offers an easy mechanism for explaining an formidably complex process, it has met with a certain success, and been described by one supporter as “a major paradigm shift in the science of the mind.”[1]

Does this theory help us to understand cultural evolution?

The theory of memes

The basis of meme theory, or memetics, is that we may extend the process of Darwinian evolution to include cultural processes as well as genetic ones. Dawkins chose the term ‘meme’ for its resemblance to ‘gene’, and its reference to the Greek mimeme or ‘that which is imitated’. A meme is a unit or pattern of information that can be stored in the memory and transferred from one person to another, and is one of the constituent parts from which culture is made. In his book Dawkins gives some examples of memes: “tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.” In fact, it appears that almost any ‘unit’ of culture, on any scale, can be a meme. In a talk in 2002, Dennett refers to ‘justice’ and ‘Catholicism’ as memes.[2]

Because the person who first supplied the meme will continue to host it, the process is one of replication — the meme reproduces itself across a growing number of individuals. As Dawkins explains it:

Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.[3]

The meme therefore can be seen as a kind of parasite or ‘mind virus’, capable of spreading from any individual to any other.

Like living organisms, memes are in a struggle for survival. The memes with the strongest adaptive value, i.e. which have the greatest probability of being reproduced, survive for many generations, the outcome being influenced by the biases of human minds and by other competing memes. Some memes prove better at replicating themselves than others. Dawkins lists the main mechanisms for this success as longevity, fecundity and fidelity: the longer a meme lasts, for example when you write it down, the more copies that can be produced of it, the more accurately the meme is copied, the greater the chance that it will be replicated often.

Criticism

The analogy drawn in memetics between Darwinian evolution and cultural evolution has some profound flaws.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is such a powerful idea that it is not surprising that some have tried to extend it to other processes, much as postmodernists took modernist theories about language and tried to expand them into a general philosophy. Justifying memes, Dawkins writes: “I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.”[4] Dennett claims, in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: “In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.” The attempt to extend natural selection beyond the evolution of species has been termed Universal Darwinism.

The problem here is that we are left with a reductionism which attempts to lever a particular biological process, based upon heredity, mutation and selection among living organisms, into fields where it does not belong. Even if one sees the analogy as purely metaphorical, living organisms are not the same as poems, or jingles, or the concept of justice, or the Catholic religion, nor are the same laws applicable. The mechanism is simply not relevant.

Cultural processes can resemble biological ones to an extent. Like organisms, culture has to be replicated across generations. In the process it undergoes changes, perhaps analogous to the mutations which underlie natural selection. However interesting this may be as a metaphor, it is inappropriate to try and use it to construct a serious theory of cultural transmission. Humans ‘make themselves’ through their material engagement with the world: genetics and culture are inter-related parts of this process, but we should not pretend they work in the same way. Merlin Donald commented:

[The meme] is an oversimplifying notion thought up by a geneticist as a way of ‘explaining’ cultural evolution without engaging in any psychology. This is why sociobiologists love memes — they can continue to avoid the complexities of psychology and physiology, as they always have.[5]

By what process does any meme survive for more than an instant, given that a dozen people playing Chinese Whispers can’t make a phrase come out the way it started? There is no mechanism for keeping the meme stable — the fidelity that Dawkins considers important.

It is hard to know if a meme even exists. How, for example, do we define a meme? Is it a poem? A phrase or sentence? A word? Who decides, on what basis, and how do we test the hypothesis? The philosopher Mary Midgley has been particularly damning:

They are not physical objects. But neither are they thoughts or ideas of the kind that normally play any part in our experience. They seem to be occult causes of those thoughts. How then do they manifest themselves? What makes us think they are there?... Invoking such extra stuff is as idle as any earlier talk of phlogiston or animal spirits or occult forces.[6]

It seems a meme can be pretty much anything a memeticist fancies, from wearing a baseball cap backwards to socialism. The archaeologist Timothy Taylor observed, “it is not, in short, a clearly defined concept, nor one that really solves anything.”[7] Catholicism, or communism, or whatever, cannot be reduced to being ‘an idea’ or ‘a meme’. These are huge, complex ideologies with a history, rival intellectual currents, and material bases in society.

Dawkins has himself accepted that memes are not the same as genes and has attempted to add nuance to his invention. Since The Selfish Gene first appeared in 1976 he has added the comment: “whether the milieu of human culture really does have what it takes to get a form of Darwinism going, I am not sure... My purpose was to cut the gene down to size, rather than to sculpt a grand theory of human culture.”[8] But in ironically meme-like fashion, the idea has spread beyond him into even stranger territory.

In his book Virus of the Mind, the computer programmer and poker player Richard Brodie suggests that many of the world’s problems are the result of mind viruses, spreading like a plague to give us “the cycle of unwed mothers on welfare, the Crips and Bloods youth gangs and the Branch Davidian religious cult.” Or, “starting with the inner cities and quickly spreading, the mind viruses infecting many children are pushing them into hopelessness, single motherhood, and gang warfare.”[9] Silly though Brodie’s book is — Dennett himself has described most writing on memetics as “awful” — it illustrates how memetics takes forms of social behaviour and reifies them into agents that cause human behaviour. The reactionary implications are clear. If one wants to address the problems experienced by single “unwed” mothers, a good beginning would be the introduction of universal free childcare; inner city youth could be spared hopelessness by employment programmes and social investment; stress could be reduced by a reduction in working hours. But following Brodie, the response must instead be to disinfect oneself of parasitic units of information, which can’t even be proved to exist! In other words: do nothing.

Memetics is no less bizarre in the work of Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine. For Blackmore, a meme is not ‘an idea’ but strictly ‘that which is replicated’, units of information which will get copied if they can. Living symbiotically with these parasites, humans are meme ‘machines’ with no free will or consciousness, hosts used by memes so they can replicate themselves. Our big brains were created by memes to this end.

Dennett too has claimed this:

A human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.[10]

Memes are conceived as independent replicators: cultural transmission in this conception is external to what people do, a product of quasi-organisms that have their own drives and reproductive interests. This is again a reification of our consciousness. Mind and body are inseparable, both from each other and from their wider natural and social environment: ideas cannot be set free to roam around pursuing their own interests. In reality, no idea is independent. Ideas originate in human engagement with the material world.

To return to Blackmore: if the first sort of replicator is genes, and the second is memes, she argues that a third one has appeared, ‘technomemes’ or ‘temes’. Temes are forcing us to make more computers and technology: our belief that the internet, etc, are created by ourselves is an illusion.

Yet humans are not machines or passive hosts. The only reason Blackmore can conceive of ‘temes’ is because human praxis has created technologies and ideologies that make such conceptions possible.

Memetics therefore fails to provide a model for cultural change. Ideas survive because they have a material basis, which is often simply to say they have power on their side. Marx pointed out long ago:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.[11]

To try and say that Paleolithic egalitarianism (‘primitive communism’) was overthrown because its memes lost out in competition with the thrusting new memes of class society would be gibberish. To understand culture we need to understand its background in biological evolution, but we also need to understand the processes of history and of class-structured power. When Marx commented “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist”[12], his formulation was crude, but his point is important — the major transformations of human society are brought about by the development of forces of production, from which an ideological superstructure arises. Ideas spread because we are social animals who grow up in an ideological context, i.e. we pick up social conventions, language, etc from our culture. It is true that people sometimes accept ideology passively. But people also actively challenge social conventions, mould new language, select and reject based upon their concrete experience.

This is a materialist, scientific way of understanding the transmission of culture and of ideas, and there is a vast body of evidence to support it. Memetics adds nothing to our understanding of how this works.

Remove psychology, history, class and economics from cultural theory and we are left with a theory open to all sorts of reactionary nonsense. In the talk already referred to (see video below), Dennett wastes little time turning his attention to “toxic ideas”, such as “fanatical Islam”, at the same time complacently suggesting that in the US “bad” memes exist only on the fringes. He compares dangerous memes to the diseases that killed millions of people when European imperialism arrived in the New World. Yet moments after describing some memes as toxic, he claims that memetics is “morally neutral”. This is completely incoherent.

Theorists like Dawkins and Dennett enthusiastically promote science at the expense of religion, yet the meme, based upon units that cannot be defined or tested, is ironically no more scientific than ‘intelligent design’. Memetics is a pseudo-science that actively obstructs the serious discussion of the inter-relationships of biology, production, class, ideology and culture.

Conclusion

Fans of memetics take pleasure in supposedly exposing ‘uncomfortable truths’ about human nature and consciousness. Their dehumanising approach to people can be seen as another expression of the general anti-humanism and pessimism in bourgeois thought in the era of US decline and capitalist crisis. Real humans are not passive machines hosting abstract memes but active beings who constantly grapple with the ideas that surround them, including culture.

Rejecting memetics does not mean, as Dennett contends with characteristic pretension, that one is uncomfortable with the implications of Darwinism. It is rather a question of asserting good science over bad. Furthermore science always has political implications, and memes tend to the reactionary side because they obscure the real dynamics of society and culture. It is the truth that is progressive.

Dawkins has made a genuine if rather hardline contribution to genetics, but the meme, unproven yet still the beneficiary of a great deal of hot air, is one of his least useful ideas. Blackmore has identified the great problem of the age, not as imperialist warmongering, famine, increasing inequality, racism, shortage of clean drinking water, or the global warming that will kill and displace millions if not resolved — no, our real problem is memes that threaten to merge us with technology and turn us into ‘teme machines’. The fantasies spun in the ivory tower of memetics would be merely comical, if they were not such a bizarre distraction from the questions facing us in real life.

Further investigation

Read Dawkins’ chapter on memes at www.rubinghscience.org/memetics/dawkinsmemes.html
Daniel Dennett’s presentation to TED2002 (despite the strapline, not an idea worth spreading):

[1] Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind (1996).
[2] See online video of Dennett’s talk on memes at the 2002 TED event. I have embedded the video at the end of the article.
[3] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976).
[4] ibid.
[5] Merlin Donald, ‘Material Culture and Cognition’ from ed. Renfrew & Scarre, Cognition and Material Culture: the Archaeology of Symbolic Storage (1998).
[6] Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (1993).
[7] Timothy Taylor, The Artificial Ape (2010). See also his discussion of defining memes for chair design on pp159-160.
[8] Footnote to chapter 11 in the 30th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene.
[9] Apparently Brodie has “deliberately disinfected” himself of the memes he caught as he grew up, blessing him with the splendidly clear thinking he shares with us today.
[10] Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991).
[11] Marx, from Part 1B of The German Ideology (1846).
[12] Marx, Chapter 2 of The Poverty of Philosophy (1847).